Beyond Data-Driven: How Today's Leading Retailers Are Leveraging Insights to Sell Better

Supply chain disruption continues to affect retailers, consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs), and customers. Constraints on the ability to produce goods have limited the availability of in-demand products, leading to inflation. Not only are manufacturers not making enough products in line with demand in industries such as automotive and electronics, at the same time, those products have become much more expensive. Consumers now find their wallets getting stretched as prices rise on everything from groceries to luxury goods.

In a recent webinar, Snowflake and Seek, a Snowflake Elite Partner, discussed how their customers are using data and insights to tackle these economic challenges. The Seek Insight Cloud is a cloud-native platform that helps organizations discover insights at scale through turnkey analytics applications. Joint customers can fully leverage the performance, flexibility, and near-infinite scalability of the Snowflake Data Cloud in combination with industry-leading AI/ML-driven applications and solutions from the Seek Insight Cloud to stay ahead of market trends.

Here’s how data and insights help retailers and CPGs weather economic fluctuations and prepare for tomorrow’s disruptions—today.

It’s essential for the retail industry to be data-driven to succeed in today’s challenging economy. But leading companies are taking it a step further and also becoming insight-driven. They are generating faster speed to insights by creating data and analytics solutions powered by the best data in the market. These solutions are often customized to solve one particular issue such as future out-of-stocks, on-shelf availability, and item assortment. But time is of the essence in creating these solutions, and organizations don't always have massive analytics teams to build them internally. What they're looking for is a combination of partners to create that solution for them quickly and efficiently. 

Snowflake and Seek provide the agility to get seamless access to data and analytics, so businesses can get insights quickly. Customers have taken their time to solution deployment from 12 months to as few as 12 days. What’s more, Snowflake’s Data Cloud and Seek’s Insight Cloud enable customers to run analytics that can solve tomorrow’s problems today, instead of six months from now. 

The first step to becoming insight-driven and generating faster speed to insights is acquiring the most accurate, comprehensive range of data available. A solution that helps with supply chain issues, for instance, will need access to raw data on things such as weather, commodity risks, UPC-level attributes of products, and consumer transactions. That access needs to be fast and seamless. 

Snowflake Marketplace offers one-click access to and easy integration of high-quality data from more than 430 providers, which includes more than 1,800 live, ready-to-use data sets, data services, and applications to customers. There’s no need to copy or move the data, which can cause time delays. Seek can integrate the data into its Insight Cloud and create a pre-integrated solution that addresses challenges, from demand planning to distribution expansion.

A global CPG company and a national retailer decided to share data from their inventory and stores with one another through Snowflake and run analytics to do forecasting through Seek. The business results were almost immediate: out-of-stocks reduced by 14%, resulting in a 5% growth in revenue and significant cost reductions. By partnering on data, the companies were able to forecast supply and demand much more accurately, enabling them to procure and produce the right amount of materials and commodities needed. This impacted pricing all the way downstream to the customer. Most importantly, customers found the products they needed on the shelf at the right time and the right price—leading to a great in-store customer experience for the retailer and customer loyalty for the brand. 

Leading retailers and CPGs are asking for solutions that can help them look at their entire supply chain holistically, collaborate with partners, and accelerate insights using the best data possible. To learn more about ways retailers can leverage data to succeed through times of uncertainty, read our ebook, 7 Ways to Leverage Data for Holiday Season Success.