The Brand and Customer Experience Challenge
To sustain positioning and leadership as the ‘service-based, high-touch, local hardware business’ and strengthen dominance in the convenience segment of the retail home improvement market, Ace needed to transform the timeliness, breadth, and quality of its retail reporting and increase the amount and quality of product content available to retailers. This would allow improved product search, evaluation, online ordering of home and hardware products, and deliver the product knowledge needed or a consistent, personalized shopping experience. Ace needed to analyze point-of-sale (POS) data in real-time, across all 4,800 locally owned stores.
Internal IT & Analytics Challenges
Ace tracked which products retailers ordered when they were ordered and shipped. However, Ace could not forecast or easily track actual sales, since data used for reporting was up to one week old, due to performance and data cleansing issues.
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An additional requirement was the integration of wholesale and inventory data with POS data to help drive key business decisions, improve category management, lower inventory costs, and optimize pricing.
Equally challenging was the reliance on custom coding to integrate POS data, which was excessively resource-intensive and led to major performance constraints.
Solutions & Results: Experience Excellence
A robust analytics software infrastructure was selected, beta-tested and implemented to integrate critical POS data from1,500 retail locations with its wholesale and inventory systems for strategic analysis by sales, marketing, and pricing managers.
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Increased profit margins and pricing structure enablement. For example, if a store sells a paint brush for $3.99, but other stores sell it at $4.99, a recommendation is sent to the region for pricing standardization at the higher price.
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Real time POS analysis enables Ace to replenish inventory systems and in-store stock more quickly, reducing inventory holding costs.
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Customer Experience Design empowered Ace to target customers more effectively by analyzing historical buying habits and detecting trends.
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Delivery of personalized automated content and email messages that integrated with the POS and in-store customer experience and strategic online promotions.
