Business Intelligence (BI)

By Ken Westin, Tripwire

For the second time in a year, Sally Beauty Holdings, which owns U.S. Sally Beauty stores, is currently investigating reports of unusual activity involving payment cards used at some of their stores.

San Francisco - Visa Inc. is expanding its technology research capabilities globally and appointing Min Wang to senior VP of Visa Research Labs. Wang joins Visa from Google Research, where she was a senior staff research scientist focused on data mining.

She also held senior staff research roles at HP Labs China and at the Unified Data Analytics Department at the IBM Watson Research Center.

New York - L'Oreal USA is announcing the first measured results of its global sustainability program, Sharing Beauty With All. By 2020, the company pledges that 100% of products will have an environmental or social benefit and 100% of strategic suppliers will be evaluated on their social and environmental performance.

Industry insiders are the best trend-watchers. Here’s what the experts are seeing.

“There is more selectivity in the site selection process. There is a trend toward downsizing, and more non-retail tenants are taking interest. There is also a growing divide between A-plus real estate and everything else in the market. Everyone wants the best properties.” — Mark Dufton, CEO of DJM Real Estate, a Gordon Brothers Group company

“Retailers are thinking about a smaller footprint, but in most cases not significantly smaller.

Roanoke, Va. - Advance Auto Parts Inc. has selected Teradata as the vendor of choice for its Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).

Advance Auto Parts will leverage the EDW to aggregate data from multiple sources to perform advanced analytics and help drive the business.

The new Teradata platform at Advance includes testing as well as production and will leverage the Teradata Americas Data Migration Center of Expertise

Washington, D.C. - As a result of higher same-store sales and a continued optimistic outlook for future business conditions, the National Restaurant Association's Restaurant Performance Index (RPI) remained in positive territory in March. The RPI, a monthly composite index that tracks the health of and outlook for the U.S. restaurant industry, stood at 102.2 in March, down 0.4% from February's level of 102.6.

Front-end omnichannel success relies on back-end fulfillment

The front-end promise of omnichannel retail cannot be delivered without investment in back-end technology and processes that allow fulfillment of orders across multiple channels. Retailers must eliminate internal silos and obtain real-time awareness of their full inventory.

Omnichannel fulfillment is a difficult, but not impossible, task.

David’s Bridal gets personal with advanced digital analytics

There are few events more personal in a woman’s life than her wedding.

Tom Lichford, VP retail technologies, NRF, recommends retailers seeking to achieve compliance with upcoming October 2015 EMV mandate take the following five steps:

1. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: “No matter what, start with customer experience,” advised Litchford. Retailers need to determine such factors as whether they will use self-service or traditional POS, customer prompts and screen displays, and how checkout speed will be impacted.

The upcoming Oct. 1, 2015, mandate for U.S. retailers to adopt POS systems that can securely accept and process transactions using EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa)-compliant, chip-based payment cards is fast approaching. Retailers that are not in compliance with the mandate after that date will be held liable for any fraudulent transaction committed with a chip-based card.