Business Intelligence (BI)

Jon Abolins, senior tax director at Avalara
 

New York -- E-commerce and payments fraud remains high on the agenda for consumer-facing organizations, according to a recent Deloitte online poll. Nearly half (47%) of executives and managers reported that fraud protection ranks as a "high priority" for their organization, and a further 8% cited this as their organization's number one priority.

Digital media company Specific Media and Nielsen have joined forces to offer a new platform called Retail Connect designed to address what the firms regard as a gap between offline and online advertising.

According to Specific Media, the Retail Connect platform will allow for more effective advertising for brands as well as consumers because it leverages Nielsen’s Buyer Insights aggregate data about in-store consumption habits and online behaviors to inform an optimized and efficient approach to online advertising.

Roswell, Ga. – PGA Tour Superstores plans to improve operational efficiency and prepare for future growth using the SAP HANA business intelligence platform and the new SAP Customer Activity Repository application.

In an Oct. 8 session at the SAP Retail Forum 2013 in Dallas, Stephen McDonnold, CIO of PGA Tour Superstore, explained how his company and Cognizant Technology Solutions are working with SAP to create an IT environment supporting maximum operational efficiency.

San Francisco - Walk-by conversion and in-store engagements among U.S., consumers slipped in September compared to August as consumers became more cautious and less compelled to shop after back-to-school spending. In-store analytics technology vendor Euclid’s U.S. Retail Benchmarks for September 2013, based on 20 million domestic shopping sessions, suggest September same-store and total store sales may be sluggish for many retailers.

Specific findings include:

London -- Storage Made Easy announced that the global cosmetics retailer Lush has chosen to use its Enterprise File Share and Sync solution with data stored on OpenStack Swift.


Lush ran an initial two month trial with 50 people prior to moving forward with the Storage Made Easy solution. They subsequently rolled out the solution in stages, by department, first to 150 people and then on to 300 people, and then again on to 500 people.

Cosmetics retailer Lush is turning to Storage Made Easy’s Enterprise File Share and Sync solution with data stored on OpenStack Swift to help improve its global reach.


Lush ran an initial two month trial with 50 people prior to moving forward with the Storage Made Easy solution. They subsequently rolled out the solution in stages, by department, first to 150 people and then on to 300 people, and then again on to 500 people.

“Lush expects to reach more than 1,000 users by the time the solution is fully rolled out," said Jim Liddle, Storage Made Easy CEO.

Rite Aid has decided to extend its sourcing partnership with Intesource, an e-sourcing provider in the retail, drugstore, grocery and restaurant industries.

Rite Aid has leveraged Intesource's e-sourcing technology since 2009. The partnership helped the chain secure significant savings on both direct and indirect categories — including snow plowing services — and drove efficiencies across the entire supply chain.

Dallas -- To help retailers better understand and act on consumer behavior in the fast changing retail market place, SAP AG announced the SAP Customer Activity Repository application, a new retail data repository powered by the SAP HANA platform. 

Amazon has introduced a new service that streamlines how customers transact with online merchants. Login and Pay with Amazon allows customers of participating companies to go from browsing to buying in just a few clicks using their Amazon account information.