Retail Solutions
Decrypting Consumer Behavior through Big Data

The growing data on consumer behavior, their needs, and demands, is having a profound impact on the operations in the CPG sector. This data, collected from sources like point of sale, mobile platforms, social media, and in-store engagement, can help measure market demand and aid suppliers in avoiding shortages. Except sorting through this enormous amount of information is a herculean task. CPG companies are trying to find better means to organize and use this information to make it relevant and easily accessible. Retail Solutions, Inc. (RSi), a California-based IT company, adept at handling large volumes of consumer data, achieves this using their proprietary user-friendly tools.

The software platform offered by RSi promises to organize retailer data collected on a daily basis into actionable insights through various tools like applications and use-case templates to augment the performance of CPGs. These tools help increase the potential of the information gathered by visualizing it and making it easier to use and share. RSi also finds various means to harness the benefits of cloud networks without compromising on data integrity. This data sharing initiative encourages cooperation between distributors and helps improve the quality of distribution networks by identifying and correcting gaps in the supply chain. The data collected from over 150,000 store locations is cleaned by RSi and then organized for easy utilization. Understanding this data helps in increasing the impact of product promotions and improving the on-shelf availability of products. As Jonathan Golovin, CEO of RSi explains, “In the past, CPG companies had to buy, build and maintain their own IT systems for managing downstream retail data. But now, the cloud provides an alternative to investing in software licenses, headcount, hardware and other fixed costs.” Companies like RSi that provide Software-as-a-Service models are an alternative to heavy IT investments. “Our suite of solutions across the enterprise arena has a global reach through secure and private cloud architectures,” he adds.

Implementing such measures increases the speed of adoption and deployment. “We provide the most cost-effective and timely ways to understand, audit, and solve in-store activation issues,” says Golovin.

There are many instances where RSi’s platform has aided companies in making informed choices on product supply. Take the case of Unilever, an international manufacturer of more than 400 consumer healthcare products, which utilizes RSi’s cloud-based platform to improve and streamline data sharing with its retail partners in China. “Using the RSi platform, Unilever can easily collect retailer Big Data including point-of-sale, out-of-stock, forecasts, promos, and pricing, and transform it into action¬able business intelligence to be shared with supply chain partners across the enterprise,” says Golovin. This scalable data infra¬structure created a clarified communication channel between the retailer and supplier, which helped boost the efficiency and cost savings. This could be seen in the immediate increase in sales ob¬served by the CPG companies in China.

We provide the most cost-effective and timely way to understand, audit, and solve in-store activation issues

RSi’s global reach and the large market share places the company far ahead of the competition. In addition, RSi also offers retailer collaboration programs and technologies, backed by major retailers, and they have spent two years rebuilding the platform to support massive parallel processing and true Big Data environments. In the years ahead, RSi plans to improve its current platform by making it more flexible in terms of how data can be accessed. Efforts to include new and innovative data sources, and to provide a more holistic view in terms of end-to-end supply chain and across multiple retailers and channels, are underway to enhance the speed and quality of the data collected and delivered.