For retailers, these spells both opportunities and challenges.
The good news? These digitally savvy consumers are leaving a treasure trove of digital footprint, openly sharing their likes dislikes, motivations, preferences, etc.
So, what is the bad news? It is true that retailers now have access to unprecedented amounts of data but unfortunately, they lack the platform to extract insights from them.
To stay on top of their game, they need a comprehensive 360-degree view of their complete operation and customer insights. This is where Microsoft business intelligence- Power BI comes into the picture.
It helps turn the data into powerful actionable insights such as Sales Performance Analysis, Supply chain optimization, Customer insights, and more. Moreover, it has the capability to aggregate data from various points in the value chain and act as a command center delivering a comprehensive view of retail operations in its entirety. It could be as simple as viewing the performance of the workforce to complex integration a like supply chain control tower that incorporates logistics, warehousing, inventory, material management, fulfilment information.
Let's get into a few key areas where truly shines.
Top 4 types of Retail dashboards in the Power BI platform
Inventory Management
To target a wide variety of consumer groups, retailers offer multiple SKUs. But here is the challenge: Keeping tabs on the stock level, and performance of so many different products simultaneously can quickly get tricky. Hence, Power BI can act a powerful tool to track everything at one place and perform analysis as needed-
- Forecasting Models: To predict future demand, Power BI supports time-series forecasting using its built-in algorithms.
- R Integration: Retailers can utilize R scripts within Power BI to implement advanced statistical techniques such as ARIMA.
- Automatic Alerts: Retailers can set up notifications for when inventory levels fall below predefined thresholds.
Omnichannel Experience
The mode of purchase is changing- consumers are staying in the comfort of their homes and are surfing online shopping platforms.
According to Statista, in the US,
43%- Consumers who prefer to shop online
27%- Consumer who still visit a brick-and-mortar store.
But regardless of their preferences, brands must have an omnichannel presence to maximize their sales potential. Power BI solves the challenge of managing multiple and disparate data sources-
- Channel Aggregation: The data from various channels (online sales, in-store, mobile apps) can be aggregated to get a comprehensive view of the complete business and analyze performance across.
- Customer Journey Mapping: Power BI’s built-in mapping capabilities can help chart the customer journey- identify important touchpoints and conversion rates across channels.
Consumer Trends Tracking
Tracking consumer-related information has been easier
Consumer demand is constantly shifting and to stay ahead in this competitive market, every interaction with consumers should have some degree of personal touch. How do they do this? By tracking key data points through the Microsoft Power BI platform, and analyze them by:
- Clustering Data Source: Power BI can help connect data from various data sources such as CRM systems, eCommerce platforms, and point-of-sale (POS) systems. Integrating data from different sources helps build a thorough picture of the consumer and its behavior.
- DAX Calculations: Power BI uses a powerful language called, Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), allowing users to define custom columns and calculations. These can be used to analyze customer purchase patterns, segment customers based on behavior, and identify trends.
- Visualizations: Interactive visualization, such as heat maps and customer journey diagrams can make the analysis easier to understand.
Promotional Effectiveness Analysis-
In a time, when consumers are continuously torpedoed with offers, the need of the hour is to understand which are the promotions that are resonating with the consumers. This can help better optimize the cost associated with marketing and promotions. Power BI can help in analyzing promotions in the following way-
- Comparative Analysis: Power BI can be used for comparative analysis of the different promotional campaigns using its built-in analytics tools by evaluating metrics such as reach, engagement, conversion rates, and ROI across different marketing efforts.
- What-if Scenarios: Using slicers, parameters, and data modeling in Power BI, you can adjust variables such as discount rates, promotional durations, and marketing spend and observe their impact.
- Sentiment Analysis with AI: Using its built-in AI tool, Retailers can perform analyze the sentiment of their customers without having to write a single line of code.
Key Features of Microsoft Power BI-
Power BI is packed with powerful features that allow retailers to keep tabs on their business with ease:
- Natural language processing- Power BI has a built-in language processor which allows users to ask queries directly in English. This feature makes insights exploration and analysis easy.
- Smart narration- Imagine the need to explain the data, retailers can dig into data or use Power BI’s built-in Co-pilot tool, to get the summary of all the important insights from the data.
- Visuals like Decomposition Tree- The Decomposition Tree Visual in Power BI is an enabled artificial intelligence (AI) visualization that can be leveraged for Ad Hoc exploration and conducting root cause analysis.
- Microsoft Teams integration- Retailers can make their reports available in the Microsoft Teams platform seamlessly. Moreover, the reports are interactive, and filters can be used directly within the Teams tab.
- Power Query- To check the quality of the data, Power BI’s power query provides functions like connecting to a wide variety of data sources, cleaning, shaping, and combining data from multiple sources, and ultimately preparing it for analysis.
- Dashboard alerts- Power BI allows for the creation of customer alerts which can be triggers based on pre-defined parameters, allowing for better control.
Understanding the Data Flow-
Power BI can seamlessly integrate with the Microsoft Fabric platform. The Direct Lake storage in Microsoft Fabric allows for an easy data access for real-time analytics in Power BI. Let’s investigate how this flow works-
- Data Ingestion: One Lake acts as a unified storage platform that accepts data in different formats. In this step, data is collected from different platforms like Excel files, SAP solutions, and from different sources such as transactional databases, IoT devices, mobile, websites, and physical stores.
- Direct Access Via One Lake: Power BI can access data stored in One Lake directly without having to load it to a separate analytical storage. This is done through XMLA endpoints, which support querying and processing operations.
- Real-time analytics- With One Lake, Power BI bypasses the traditional cycle of extract, transform and load (ETL process), reducing the latency.
Get a complete understanding of the different impact areas of Power BI in businesses, visit the page Microsoft Power BI Services.
Conclusion
Microsoft business intelligence tool Power BI is a powerful platform with a suite of features that can be used at one point or the other in the retail value chain. This empowers retailers to get a complete and accurate picture of their entire business at one place. With complex in-depth analysis displayed in the form of easy-to-understand interactive visuals, retailers can quickly make decisions to stay ahead of the competitive retail space. With Microsoft integrating new-age AI technologies in Power BI, its power and potential getting an intelligent touch.