
Supermarket co-op stocks up on big data platform to help spur sales
Co-operative Allegiance Retail Services is deploying a cloud-based big data stack to replace a homegrown system that fell short on analytics power.
For example, Allegiance Retail Services LLC, an Iselin, N.J.-based supermarket co-operative that provides IT, marketing and merchandising services to its members, is moving to a cloud-based big data platform to track customer purchases and share analytical data with consumer packaged goods manufacturers. The initiative is aimed at optimizing buying and marketing strategies to help improve sales and profits for store owners as well as their suppliers, said John Derderian, the co-op's vice president of sales, marketing and member development.
"Our goal is to make better business decisions -- to see some of the nuances in our customer shopping patterns," Derderian said. Allegiance's existing systems, combining homegrown PC-based applications and a third-party data warehouse, faced challenges on reporting performance, according to Derderian. Also, they didn't support ad hoc querying and required users to manually combine data from multiple sources to get answers to complex questions. "I saw a void in speed and robustness," he said.
But there was something of much greater importance lacking in the way the incumbent systems were architected. Derderian said the setup reflected the three-year-old co-op's earlier need to focus on purchasing, inventory management and logistics -- the basics of acquiring goods and moving pallets and cases. Now, detailed analysis of store sales needs to be higher in the mix.
"Culturally, we had to understand what was going on in retail," he said. In addition, Allegiance hopes the shift to the big data system will set the stage for increased business collaboration between suppliers and the co-op's members, which include mid-Atlantic supermarket brands such as Foodtown, D'Agostino and Freshtown.
To improve its retail data analytics and data sharing capabilities, Allegiance is turning to 1010data Inc.'s cloud-hosted data management and analytics platform, including the vendor's data discovery software and Retail Vendor Portal application. The big data implementation began late last year, and deployment of the new technology was completed at the end of March.
Derderian sees the ability to share data with upstream suppliers as an important step toward better decision-making for Allegiance -- and the big data platform is what makes it possible. "We didn't have that opportunity in the past," he said. "We have it now."
Source: searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com