Struggling to collect all of your data to determine accurate retail data trends for your business?
SPS Analytics is designed to help you collect, clean and use your sales and inventory data across multiple retail customers. SPS Commerce has the proven process, team of experts, established networks and technology to make analyzing retail data trends a simpler (and more valuable) process for you!
Retailers
Stores & eComms
Retail Industry Metrics
Items
What are the challenges of doing your retail sales forecasts?
Point-of-Sale (POS) data should inform how to optimize your product sales and inventory, but data collection can be time-consuming. By the time you’ve collected and organized your data, sales trends have probably already shifted. Your ideal analysis is based on data that is clean, validated, organized and updated in real time so you are always sure that your data is error-free and ready to be used.
Step 1: Gather the Data
Your process starts by chasing down and collecting all the data from your trading partners. The data most likely comes in an array of different formats and sources like retailer portals, emails, spreadsheets (excel, csv and xml), API, raw data files, comma or pipe delimited, EDI 852, EDI 856, Buyer Reports or other BI tools. Once you’ve finally collected all the data, transforming the files to work together and loading them into your system can be the most cumbersome part of the process.
Step 2: Data Cleansing
Your next step is data cleansing, or data cleaning. This is the process of detecting and correcting inaccurate records and identifying incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate or irrelevant parts of the data and then replacing, modifying or deleting the bad data. This step is important because if the data isn’t clean, the sales forecast you create could cause out-of-stock or overstock situations for your products. You need data that is quality assured and ready to use to start making smart decisions about your products.
Step 3: Evaluate Your Retail Data Trends
Now you’re finally at the step where you can start to compile your dashboards and reports to analyze your retail sales forecast. Assuming the collecting and cleansing pieces have been done correctly, then you can start to make informed decisions for your business. Your retail customers are expecting expertise and data validity in order to make the best decisions for the companies future.
SPS Analytics collects, validates and presents your retail data so you can spend more time on your business.
Collection
The SPS Commerce team sits between you and your partners to collect sales and inventory data, in any format available. Then on Sundays, or early Monday mornings, SPS reaches out to your retailers to collect those formats on your behalf. Our experts work proactively to resolve any potential issues and reprocess the data before you pull the report, so you don’t have to hassle with missing or unloaded data.
Reporting
Once you have your data, you know it is high quality, properly organized and ready to be analyzed. Our pre-built best practice dashboards help you start reporting on and using your data to drive decisions right away. Our Analytics solution gives you reporting flexibility so you can pull accurate reports whenever you’d like throughout the week.
Training
SPS understands that learning how to best use the data and maximize the value you can get from a tool like this requires training. That’s why we offer tons of options when it comes to training and education. We offer tailored trading partner related product trainings, on-demand training courses, instructor led webinar trainings and 24/7/365 access to SPS Analytics experts.
Validation
Our data validation process ensures that the data you see is your source of truth. After collecting the data, our team cleanses it to ensure the data you are receiving is accurate and up-to-date. You don’t ever have to worry about updating it or checking for errors.
Expertise
Our product team is a group of retail experts who have walked in your shoes and, as a result, understand the insights that are essential to driving your business forward. When you choose SPS you get our team of experts that work with you to understand your business needs and set you up for success. Your SPS team is behind the scenes always quality checking that data and chasing down any discrepancies on your behalf.
Powered by Data
Thriving companies are focused on data-driven decision making. That’s why so many companies using multiple analytic tools or have large teams of analysts. Using a single tool, like SPS Analytics, that collects, cleans and reports your data trends will put you ahead of the competition. Plus, it’s an essential part of being a valued business partner to your retail customers. Being powered by data helps guarantee that your selling the right products to your retail partners.
SPS Analytics helps Wolverine win new business
When important retail data is coming at your sales teams in spreadsheets, hand-written messages and Post-Its, days become overwhelming and unproductive. Wolverine was struggling to solve for this challenge across its portfolio of brands, including Sperry. They began looking for a solution that would place sell through and other sales performance details from their retailers into the hands of their sales teams every Monday morning.
The data-driven buyer discussions are now opportunities for uncovering more business for Wolverine. In one instance, the retail data showed several areas of untapped sales. When Wolverine’s sales team brought this to the retailer’s attention, they doubled their order for the fall season.
How do I use SPS Analytics within my business?
At the core, SPS Analytics is here to remove the complexities of your data process so we can help you whether you are at the beginning of your retail supply chain journey or have been doing it for years. While our product is founded on data collecting and cleaning, we also provide industry-leading dashboard visibility that presents data in multiple ways through tables, charts, graphs and interactive visualizations.
In fact, we have customers from enterprise level companies that use SPS Commerce to clean their data, feed it into their BI tools and share reports with their teams internally, as well as their trading partners. On the other side of the spectrum, we help emerging entrepreneurs understand how retail sales forecasting can help their business and partnerships grow quickly and efficiently.
What’s all included in our Analytics product?
Our Process
Data acquisition from all available trading partner resources
Transforming your data into one consolidated format
Data validation to proactively ensure up-front accuracy
Error prevention with behind-the-scenes data correction
On demand product training so you can learn on your own schedule
Our People
24/7 access to a full team of data experts
Platform personalization with your retail data trend experts
Trading partner outreach for data collection, problem solving and tool engagement
Retail partner specific trainings led by an SPS trainer
Our Technology
Pre-built data visualizations with item and location cross referencing
Ad hoc reporting on high level trends and product drill downs
Easy integration into other analytics or data visualization tools (i.e. Tableau, Power BI, or MicroStrategy)
Multi-device and exportable report capabilities
Responsive email alerts for schedule reports and potential issues
Chat with a Data Specialist about SPS Analytics.
Fill out this form if you'd like to be contacted by a specialist to learn more about what to do with your data or receive a product demo.
