Shoppers Stop shops BI from SAS

MUMBAI, INDIA: SAS, a player in business analytics software and services has announced that Shoppers Stop Limited - leader in the Indian Retail Sector is using SAS Business Intelligence solutions to create a single version of data within a flexible reporting platform. SAS Business Intelligence is helping Shoppers Stop Limited craft focused campaigns and offer incentives to its high-value customers, study the demographics of target markets and position appropriate merchandise in its retail stores as per a press release.

The solution offering helps Shoppers Stop in the areas of buying and merchandising — comprehensive analysis of stock and sale data; loyalty study — enabling a clear understanding of the customers and the buying trends; distribution and logistics analysis — enabling shipping, logistics and inventory analysis; operations — to be used for performance and sales analysis; loss prevention — enables tracking of price overrides, returns, hanging transfers, voids etc. and finance — comprehensive analysis of financial data.  

SAS says it has helped enhance operational efficiencies and monitor key operational parameters such as GMROF (Gross margin return on footage), GMROL (Gross margin return on labor) and GMROI (Gross margin return on investment) on an ongoing basis, to improve productivity on space, labor and inventory.

Shoppers Stop had critical requirements in the areas of reporting, analysis & information display/alerts through dashboards. SAS India has addressed these requirements by implementing the SAS EBI Solution comprising of OLAP Cubes, Static Reports & BI dashboards at Shoppers Stop. Time to intelligence has been reduced in the areas of Customer Segmentation, Marketing and Promotions, Inventory Management, Vendor Management, Product Affinity and Basket Analysis, Sales and Category Performance, Store Performance Management, Loss Prevention, Assortment Planning. SAS has also enabled live analysis of sales data across different stores which help management keep a track on store performance on an almost ‘live’ timescale.

On the successful deployment Arun Gupta, Customer Care Associate & Group Chief Technology Officer, Shoppers Stop said: “As a leader in organized retail in India, we have always been at the forefront of technology usage. With the competitive landscape getting tougher, we recognized the need to leverage our rich transactional data. After carefully examining the market, we chose SAS to drive our quest for generating insights. The journey thus far has been gratifying with SAS providing the requisite expertise towards moving data to information and insights. As we deploy the datawarehouse across our other business units, we believe that the potential to harness insights is immense with the technology stack deployed.”

As one of the key users of the management reports Vinay Bhatia, Customer Care Associate & Vice President Marketing and Loyalty, Shoppers Stop said:  “We have a very rich Customer Loyalty titled the First Citizen program and this has been the backbone in our Analytics journey. SAS has been a key partner in our Analytics journey. In the first phase of this journey, along with SAS we have gone a significant distance in terms of quality data reporting. We are now embarking on the second phase where we move from pure data Reporting to Predictive analysis.”