Business Intelligence (BI)

By Joe Majka, Verifone   President Obama’s BuySecure Initiative sets the U.S. Government on track to adopt chip and PIN payment security, parallels - and seeks to encourage - a commercial industry shift toward EMV card technology.    

Atlanta - Hooters of America is partnering with Forum Analytics for a customized real estate planning and market-optimization solution. The collaboration will allow Hooters real estate operations make real-time, data-driven decisions by allowing users to share market data and sales forecasts, as well as impact estimates and site packet materials via SIMMS Online, Forum’s proprietary mapping, reporting and analytic platform.   

Austin, Texas - Business software solution provider Epicor Software Corp. has agreed to acquire Atlanta-based ShopVisible LLC, a provider of cloud retail order management and digital commerce solutions. The acquisition of ShopVisible, expected to close by the end of the year, will expand Epicor’s position as a provider of extended omni-channel solutions for midsize and large retail chains.   

New York – Omnichannel specialty bath and beauty product brand Sabon boosted its online sales 35% during Black Friday and Cyber Monday by implementing Dynamic Yield’s personalization engine. Sabon saw lifts across key metrics including user engagement, total page views, time spent on site and sales.  

Menlo Park, Calif. – Facebook is improving its Facebook Search feature with emphasis on personalized results and mobile functionality. The social network has updated its internal search feature to provide uniquely targeted results designed to make it easy for users to find posts that have been shared with them.  

Natick, Mass. – For fashion brand Nic & Zoe, which recently opened its first brick-and-mortar store in Boston’s Shops at Prudential Center, the high degree of customer personalization and engagement found online is a routine and expected part of business. The company is using the Retail Cloud POS solution from Springboard Retail to bring personalized sales and customer engagement in the store closer to virtual levels.  

New York - The cost of healthcare, the ability to maintain margins
 and the ability to continue to grow revenue are the top business challenges in the retail sector. That’s according to GE Capital’s new national survey of c-suite executives at middle-market companies (ranging from $10 million - <$1 billion in sales).  

Chicago - Nearly half of CFOs expect the U.S. economy to improve during the next six months and only 9% expect it to worsen, according to the Grant Thornton LLP 2014 Fall CFO Survey. The biannual survey reflects the insights of more than 1,000 CFOs and other senior financial executives across the United States.  

Ann Arbor, Mich. – Rolling Stones fans will sympathize with the devilish problem facing American customers, who couldn’t get satisfaction in the third quarter of 2014. The national level of customer satisfaction fell 0.7% in the third quarter of 2014 to 75.6 on a 100-point scale, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), pointing to weak spending growth for the fourth quarter.   

Cary, N.C. – The Pantry Inc. beat Wall Street expectations with net income but missed on revenue in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014. Net income dramatically shot up to $14.7 million from $1 million in the same period a year earlier, aided by costs and expenses that remained level or dropped.   Revenue fell 3% to $1.95 billion from $2.02 billion, with declining fuel sales offsetting rising merchandising sales.