From Gut Feeling to Real-Time Retail: Why Smart BI is Every Retailer’s Secret Weapon

In today’s data-driven world, the consistently evolving retail landscape demands more than just stocking shelves or optimizing storefront processes. Be it a pioneering mCommerce brand, mid-sized retail company, or a rapidly growing eCommerce enterprise, businesses now have to handle larger datasets than ever before. These may include data related to store performance, staff efficiency, inventory, product returns, promotions, and other core areas.

However, many retailers still make critical business decisions based on traditional practices. They follow their instincts, focus on assumptions, work on MS Excel reports, and analyze weekly data manually to build operational strategies and create a plan of action.

However, this approach is slow and time-consuming. It requires continuous supervision and poses multiple risks, such as data duplication, loss of information, discrepancies, and human-based errors.

How Does the Lack of Real-Time Data Affect Retail Teams?

Let’s say your internal marketing team is planning to introduce a flash sale. But your operations team has no clue about the products that are overstocked. On the other hand, your buyer is unable to identify which areas are not meeting expectations and need quick attention. Moreover, you are heavily investing in promotions of products that are already on the clearance list.

Have you come across such a complex situation? Does this scenario sound familiar? Because many retail business owners have approached Clarion Technologies with similar challenges, including:

• Spending more time on report creation and manual analysis
• Facing difficulties while transforming data into action items
• No track of the store/region generating high ROI in real time
• Ineffective promotion strategy leading to improper targeting
• Lack of clarity on what worked and what didn’t in the long run

That’s where you can enable smart business intelligence by utilizing the transformative capabilities and features of Microsoft Power BI.

Disclaimer: Power BI is a Microsoft product.

Maximizing Data-Driven Decision-Making in Retail With Power BI

Many business professionals believe Microsoft Power BI can only be used by data analysts or IT experts. But that’s not true. Power BI can be a go-to tool for anyone who seeks quick data visualizations to fast-track decision-making across daily operations. It can help marketing specialists, store managers, and finance heads overcome real-world challenges in real time.

Here’s what can be done and achieved using Power BI in Retail:

• Seamless Multi-Location Inventory Management

Get detailed, valuable, and actionable insights into the inventory management process. Visualize available stock level data by product, store, or area. You can even set up pre-defined alerts to get notified about the low-stock items.

• Real-Time Product Sales and Returns Monitoring

Gain instant visibility across the product-selling pipeline. Know which products are in demand and discover the items that are unable to generate profits. You can compare the success ratio for products, whether online or in-store. This approach can go one step further with the addition of filters based on location, time, and customer type.  

• Faster and Error-Free Product Promotion Analysis

You don’t have to wait till the quarter ends to analyze the impact of product promotions. With Power BI integration into your existing retail system, you can easily evaluate measurable outcomes on the second day of promotion. This helps optimize capital investments and reduce operational overheads.  

• Reduced Dependency on Manual Report Generation

Stop collating data from five different sources and manually creating an MS Excel report. Power BI can help you pull relevant data from all desired sources, such as websites, inventory systems, and even Google Sheets. It can present the required information via interactive charts, graphs, and illustrations.

How Clarion Created Retail Success Story Using Power BI

• The Challenge

A leading fashion retailer with 10 physical stores and an eCommerce portal approached Clarion to address critical pain points. They struggled gathering sales and stock data from various systems. Their weekly reporting process took hours to copy-paste the necessary data into an MS Excel spreadsheet manually.

• Clarion’s Value-Based Solution

• Connected all sources for centralized data delivery.
• Built role-specific Power BI dashboards for store managers, operations team, and other executives.
• Automated report generation for daily sales, product returns, and profit margins.
  
  

• Business Impact

• Accelerated decision-making process
• Reduced product overstock
• Real-time staff performance analysis
• No dependency on the head office for data sharing

Know How Smart BI can Improve Business Productivity by 50% and Reduce Operational Costs by 40%.

Modernize Your Retail System Without a Complete Overhaul

Implementing Microsoft Power BI doesn’t mean you need a 360-degree restructuring of your existing retail system. You can easily integrate Power BI dashboards into already available assets with utmost scalability and without compromising quality. Here are a few examples of platforms and tools that can be connected to the dashboards, to give you a better idea.  

• POS systems, such as Shopify, Square, and Lightspeed
• Google Analytics and Ads platforms
• ERP systems and inventory management software
• MS Excel, CSV, and PDF files

Eliminate Guesswork from Your Retail Business with Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is an optimal solution to avoid assumptions taking over your decisions. It is a strategic tool that can help retail business owners streamline processes, reduce potential errors, remove misleading data, and minimize human intervention to the best.

Whether you are looking to manage one retail store or seek support to monitor multiple stores spread across 100 different locations, Power BI can help you achieve business success. It can easily bring clean, precise, and up-to-date data visuals to your fingertips. These visuals not only help you better analyze your retail operations but also improve business outcomes in the long run.

Implementing Microsoft Power BI is not about adding a data analytics dashboard to your existing retail system. Instead, it focuses on empowering your teams with real-time data to fast-track workflows and ensure optimal use of available resources.

Are you curious how this can boost your business ROI and productivity? Leverage Clarion’s Power BI development services to get started. We are backed by the top 1% BI experts and data analytics specialists. Partner with us to build a more smarter and clearer reporting system for informed decision-making.