Business Intelligence (BI)

By Branden Jenkins, General Manager Retail, NetSuite

A retailer’s inventory is typically its top expense, and managing the right range of merchandise across channels and locations is a delicate balancing act. That balancing act only becomes more difficult when faced with today’s consumers who shop across multiple channels and have little patience for retailers who cannot meet the challenges of managing inventory and delivering real-time visibility across those channels.

San Bernadino, Calif. – Stater Bros. Holdings Inc. reported a substantial increase in net income, for the first quarter of fiscal 2014. Net income more than doubled to $11.1 million from $5.4 million in the same period a year earlier. Net sales rose almost 2% to $984 million, to $968.7 million.  

Same-store sales grew 1.4%. Jack H. Brown, chairman, president and CEO of Stater Bros., credited the supermarket retailer’s maintaining of a low-price market strategy during difficult economic times with boosting financial performance.

New York - A new Verizon report has found that too many businesses, following their annual assessment for meeting the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, fail to maintain ongoing compliance – putting the businesses at an increased risk for data breaches, and financial and reputational damages.

White Plains, N.Y. - IBM has unveiled the ‘Ready for Smarter Commerce’ program, a new ecosystem that gives clients access to certified pre-built partner solutions with integrated cloud, mobile and social capabilities. The ecosystem features partner-led solutions built on IBM Smarter Commerce capabilities such as IBM Commerce and IBM Digital Marketing Optimization.   

San Francisco -- Revel Systems, providers of enterprise iPad point-of-sale (POS) solutions, announced that pizza chain Pizza Patrón has selected Revel Systems as its POS solution for 100 plus store locations.

With the implementation of Revel Systems iPad POS across the Pizza Patrón franchise, stores can tap into cross-store metrics such as sales and inventory reports from one secure cloud based portal.  

Reston, Va. -- comScore and Google are partnering to offer a real-time audience metric designed to help brand marketers easily measure campaigns across screens. After a period of testing, comScore vCE will be available to DoubleClick marketer and publisher clients, built into the widely used ad management platform.

Westlake Village, Calif. - Guitar Center has selected 360pi to increase their awareness of the competitive marketplace and to utilize the actionable insights gained from the 360pi intelligence to increase market competitiveness. Guitar Center had been using another provider, but selected 360pi’s 360price and 360assortment products to deliver near real-time insights into their competitive set.

Mount Laurel, N.J. -- Agilence, a provider of cloud-based exception reporting solutions, announced that Redner's Markets has deployed Agilence’s Retail 20/20 to reduce shrink and improve in-store operations. The solution will also be utilized to provide visibility into daily store processes to increase efficiency and reduce fraud. Based in Reading, Redner's Markets is an employee-owned, regional supermarket chain with 44 warehouse markets and 18 quick shops throughout Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware.