3 Ways Retailers Can Capitalize OnStreaming Analytics

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2VITRIA TECHNOLOGY, INC. > 3 Ways Retailers Can Capitalize On Streaming Analytics

The ChallengesTable of Contents

The Challenges

Introducing Vitria OI for Streaming Analytics

The Benefits

How Vitria OI Complements Hadoop

Summary

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Today’s retailers are in an extremely competitive environment. They can no longer

afford to fail to understand and anticipate their customers’ needs. Their customers

are inundated with choices that are, literally, just a click away. Very often, retailers

have less than a minute to influence customer decisions and perceptions. To

achieve and maintain a competitive advantage, a retail establishment must be

able to excel in the following areas:

Introducing Vitria Operational Intelligence

Vitria Operational Intelligence (OI) empowers retailers to quickly act on insights

gleaned from streaming data and information – while it still counts. It brings

together state-of-the-art stream processing, real-time analytics, visual

dashboards, and business process management capabilities into one unified

platform to help retailers take immediate process-based action on the discovered

insights.

Streaming data includes events and data from computer networks and RFID tags,

RSS feeds for weather and traffic, as well as social media. Stored data includes

information in databases, data warehouses, enterprise applications, and Big Data

frameworks such as Hadoop. With Vitria OI, retailers benefit from the following:

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2. Engaging in real-time, 1-to-1 marketing with their customers

3. Proactively detecting and preventing fraud

1. Visibility into real-time events

2. Insight into what these events mean to the organization

3. The ability to take immediate action on the discovered insights

Vitria Operational Intelligence Architecture Diagram

1. Creating a highly responsive supply chain to meet the needs of their

customers

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Retailers can save significant amounts of revenue and improve customer

satisfaction by accurately predicting their inventory needs, precisely determining

when it is time to reorder, and knowing when a shortage might occur. Vitria OI

empowers supply chain managers to easily track-and-trace operational activity

across applications and organizations, in real-time, and then take immediate

action on the uncovered insights – a task that is almost impossible with siloed

monitoring systems. With Vitria OI, retailers can continuously monitor their supply

chain processes so as to quickly detect shortages, overages, or missed

shipments, especially when dealing with priority orders, which will ultimately

reduce customer dissatisfaction and revenue loss.

3 Ways Retailers Can Capitalize On Streaming Analytics

Real-Time End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility

Real-Time 1-to-1 Marketing

Real-Time Fraud Detection & Prevention

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Streaming Analytics Benefits 3 Ways to Capitalize on Streaming Analytics

Retail and quick serve restaurant chains, with hundreds of store locations as well

as an online presence, are constantly struggling to get a complete picture of the

progress of their orders through an increasingly complex supply chain. The

challenge of being able to track-and-trace purchase orders through to shipment

fulfillment arises from the fact that orders typically touch numerous siloed systems

as they move from suppliers and logistics partners to distribution centers to store

locations. There is no single system of record that can provide retailers with end-

to-end visibility. This challenge is further compounded when dealing with

perishable goods or seasonal items. In a highly competitive market, where

customers have a plethora of choices that are often, just a click away, retailers

have no choice, but to make sure that they are never out-of-stock. This calls for an

extremely responsive supply chain that is only possible through complete cross-

enterprise visibility and the ability to immediately address issues and fluctuations

in demand.

Streaming Analytics for End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility

How End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility Works

4VITRIA TECHNOLOGY, INC. > 3 Ways Retailers Can Capitalize On Streaming Analytics

The goal of marketing, for any retailer, is to identify a potential customer and send

personalized marketing offers to him or her – when it is most relevant. It is no

longer enough to know that a certain customer bought a shirt from a particular

retail store last month. Going forward, retailers will need to combine and analyze

such data points, plus others, from a variety of different resources, in real-time.

Retailers will still want to know about that past purchase. However, more

importantly, retailers will also want to know when that customer is actually in the

store or online, considering a purchase, and therefore likely to convert an offer into

an order. Ultimately, retailers need to create a unique customer experience based

on a customer’s geographic location, past purchase history, and behavior

analytics. The objective for retailers now is real-time, 1-to-1 marketing – reaching

an individual customer at precisely the right moment through the right channel.

Very often, retailers do not have a complete picture of the actual supply chain

process paths. With Vitria OI, retailers can easily tap into supply chain activity

events from their ERP systems and other enterprise applications and correlate it

with other business data, such as store location information and other shipment

data, to uncover how goods actually flow from suppliers and partners to their final

destination. Retailers can establish a baseline process from the discovered

process over which they can define KPIs that can be continuously monitored for

deviations and corrective processes immediately kicked-off, so as to reduce the

potential for unhappy customers.

Vitria OI helps retailers increase customer loyalty and satisfaction by giving them

the relevant insight to engage in real-time, 1-to-1 marketing. With Vitria OI,

retailers can correlate information, such as a customer’s profile, current location,

as well as past and present purchasing patterns to present the right offer at the

right time through the right channel.

Streaming Analytics for Real-Time, 1-to-1 Marketing

Real-Time, 1-to-1 Marketing Based on Geographic Location

“Catching emerging problems in a

near real time fashion can add

significant monetary results in time

and customer sensitive supply

chains.”

Jim Sinur, Former Research VP atGartner, Inc.

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5VITRIA TECHNOLOGY, INC. > 3 Ways Retailers Can Capitalize On Streaming Analytics

Increasingly, retailers are incorporating radio frequency identification (RFID) chips

within their customer loyalty cards. These can be used to identify individuals as

they walk through a particular store. By correlating past buying patterns with their

location and customer profile, Vitria OI can be used to generate up-sell

recommendations at the Point-of-Sale (PoS). Often, loyalty card members

provide retailers with their mobile phone numbers and other details, thereby

providing additional channels that can be used to make real-time marketing offers.

Using Vitria OI, a retailer can correlate a customer’s geographic location and

profile, detect in real-time if he/ she is within a few feet of a store location, and then

text him/ her a personalized promotion that would be hard to decline.

Streaming Analytics for Security & Fraud Detection

According to Forrester Research, global retailers lose between $200 billion and

$250 billion every year to fraud. Fraud costs retailers significant revenues, in

addition to the time and resources it takes to recoup these lost revenues and deal

with the negative publicity and drop in customer satisfaction levels. By the time

many retailers have actually detected the fraud, the transaction has already

cleared and the person committing the fraud has disappeared. The challenge with

detecting fraud lies in being able to identify it early, ideally at the point it is being

committed, rather than waiting for credit card companies to respond. Retailers

need to detect and act on two types of fraud: 1) illegal or illicit behavior from within

the company, such as a nefarious employee, and 2) fraudulent transactions that

originate from outside the company, such as credit card fraud. With Vitria OI,

retailers can monitor all activity in real-time and get alerted to outliers and unusual

activity. For external fraud, retailers can incorporate quickly changing fraudulent

characteristics into new fraud models, and deploy these updated models rapidly to

predict potentially fraudulent transactions so they can be detected faster.

Fraud Detection & Prevention

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Vitria OI helps form the basis for a real-time fraud detection and prevention

solution. With Vitria OI, behavior can be tracked using real-time data feeds that are

compared to baseline reference data, analyzed, and displayed using live

dashboards. Furthermore, Vitria OI can complement existing security solutions by

detecting patterns in their results and comparing those patterns to current

behavior, in real-time.

3 Ways Retailers Can Capitalize On Streaming Analytics

Complementing Hadoop & Other Offline Big Data Analytics

Retailers continue to amass vast volumes of data. The most obvious source of this

data is about the customers themselves. In the past, this data was only used for

basic customer relationship management. Other Big Data sources include point-

of-sale transactions, clickstreams, and third-party sources. In addition, sensors

and RFID tags are being added to inventory pallets and customer loyalty cards to

monitor supplier and customer activity in real-time.

Retailers are storing more and more data about inventory management and

customer relationship management in order to tap into this valuable resource for

customer insights. Using Big Data frameworks, such as Hadoop, these large data

sets provide an incredible opportunity for greater insight and intelligence on

business operations. It helps retailers monitor inventory levels, segment

customers, personalize offerings, conduct deeper analysis, and improve

decisions.

However, this analysis is performed on Big Data ‘at rest.’ By combining these ‘at

rest’ analytics with the streaming data analytics provided by Vitria OI, retailers

have a formidable set of tools with which to tame the data deluge for both Big Data

‘at rest’ and Big Data ‘in motion.’ Vitria OI provides the ability to visualize real-time

feeds and take real-time action on significant events. Where the same feeds are

stored in a Big Data framework, Vitria OI can work alongside the Big Data store,

providing the ability to replay past events, analyze those events for patterns, and

compare past events with the current situation.

Using this combined approach, Sales and Marketing, for example, can understand

personalized customer behavior, creating marketing campaigns to an audience of

one. Real-time insight enables the creation of novel location- and time-based

product offerings. Store managers can create precise offer bundles based on an

individual customer’s preferences, and the success of new product launches can

be monitored in real-time against the business plan and adjustments made on-the-

fly.

7VITRIA TECHNOLOGY, INC. > 3 Ways Retailers Can Capitalize On Streaming Analytics

Summary:

The retailers that will break away from the rest of the pack are the ones that can

crack the code for unleashing the power of the data that they have at their

fingertips to drive real-time action. Vitria OI provides innovative retailers with that

opportunity. Retailers can continuously analyze and act on live, streaming data

and use the real-time Operational Intelligence that they glean to forge new and

improved relationships with their customers, better understand and anticipate

customer needs, and turn every interaction into a potential opportunity to generate

revenue.

Vitria OI is the only unified solution that can continuously monitor business activity

across applications, spot bottlenecks, and speed corrective action through alerts

and guided workflows. It can integrate, correlate, and analyze streaming events

for richer, real-time insight in context.

8VITRIA TECHNOLOGY, INC. > 3 Ways Retailers Can Capitalize On Streaming Analytics

945 Stewart Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94085

Tel: +1 (877) 365-5935

Email: info@vitria.com

www.vitria.com

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