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Hi, I'm Esther Christoffersen, and I look after retail within Cloud and
Enterprise marketing at Microsoft.
In the modern retail environment, information is available everywhere.
Consumers are well informed, and expect intuitive, engaging,
and informative experiences when and where ever they shop,
be it in person in a physical store, or online.
Options for online, in store, and
mobile purchases are only increasing and the data collected from
the various points of engagement with a consumer is exploding.
In order to thrive in the long term, retailers need to adapt
to the reality of connected consumers and their demands.
Because of the rich digital experience, customers also expect
a personalized experience when visiting a physical store.
With so many channels and option for where, when,
and how to buy things, shopping is no longer just about shopping,
it's about an experience, it's about convenience,
it's about making the consumer's life just a little easier.
Think beyond the transactional data.
Think about gathering the data when a consumer tries something on,
the rich data the employee gets face-to-face,
the in-store shopping habits.
What about the rich data from digital, social sharing,
user review, feedback and interaction with the brand?
What if you knew exactly which items to stock in which store, and
could make real time and predictive decisions on the inventory mix?
So, what can you do?
We have a wealth of options for you to get started,
whether you want a template to guide you on your journey or a finished
software as a service application to help run your business.
As the amount of data available to Enterprises increase,
there is an incredible opportunity for
retailers to drive transformation through advanced analytics.
According to a recent Accenture research paper,
90% of business leaders expect big data to dramatically change
how they do business,
having a landmark effect similar to the development of the internet.
Retailers need solutions that can help them take advantage of
all the first and third party data they have.
We've heard from our customers that they want to used advanced analytics
and big data to improve business processes and
increase competitiveness.
But building intelligent solutions is difficult, time-consuming and
expensive.
Many retailers are also not up to the challenges of identifying and
prioritizing what types of insights
would be most relevant to the business and
how they can use advanced analytics to solve business problems.
We have several ways to get retail companies started.
We'll talk about two of these ways in the rest of this video.
The first option is the recently announced
Cortana Intelligence Solution templates.
These templates simplify your journey to an intelligent business
application.
They allow for rapid prototyping of common advanced analytics scenarios
with a streamlined deployment experience, domain specific machine
learning models, and trained partners to get started with.
These templates truly accelerate your journey to a custom intelligent
app and take the complexity out of the data science.
However, if you want fully finished apps that you can easily get started
with, Microsoft has worked with domain specialist partners to build
finished solutions that let you get started and
unleash advanced analytics easily.
Some examples include Inventory Optimization from Neal Analytics,
and pricing and promotion execution from Flintfox.
Let's look at the solution templates.
The Demand Forecasting Solution template lets you
optimize pricing with machine learning.
You can predict the volume of sales for the next time period, and
its sensitivity under various scenarios.
Amongst other things, you can change prices to smooth demand and
optimize profit, and align product availability and supplier delivery
time lines to reduce out of stock items and minimize working capital.
You can also evaluate various scenarios and
price elasticity to minimize obsolete inventory.
Let's look at a demo of demand forecasting in action.
I'm gonna turn it over to Kabir Sharma, who looks after product
marketing for advance analytics here at Microsoft.
>> That you Esther.
I'm excited to share this Demand Forecasting and
Price Optimization solution template.
This template helps a retailer with multiple stores, and
departments, and products, better optimize the pricing.
There are three
different experiences within the solution template.
So, let us get started.
The first thing that you are looking at on the screen is the price
elasticity.
So, on the right when you look at, there are different products,
different departments in the stores that the retailer has.
And I can click on a particular product within a particular
department and a particular store to get the price elasticity number.
Cuz we've been able to capture all this data from different POS
systems.
I can go back to the original view and
I have an overall view of what customers have been able to pay or
what their propensity to pay for different products is.
Now, based on this propensity to pay, this price elasticity,
we have been able to score demand forecasting for
the same set of products.
And here in this view you can see what the demand forecast was
in black, and what the actual demand was in green.
And we here highlight the important thing,
the mean absolute percentage error percentage.
What forced a difference in our demand forecast view
versus the actuals?
And this is really important for the retailers to understand that any
demand for casting model will have certain degree of error.
But it's exciting to see what small errors we have with this solution
template.
Now, the last and final part of this, the pricing optimization.
Since we have a good knowledge about what the price elasticity is,
what a customer wants to pay for a particular skill and
what the expected demand will be, we can tweak the price,
we can improve it or decrease it to maximize our profit.
And that is the most important number in the solution template,
the 15.18% profit increase by better optimizing the price.
Because if we're able to predict the price elasticity,
as well as demand forecasting.
Now, how do you get started with this?
It's really simple.
All you need to do is, pressing deploy solution.
And this will take you to a simple page where all you need to do is,
put in a deployment name.
I'm going to put test for simplicity.
Choose the Azure subscription that you have.
Yes, you do need a Azure subscription for this account.
And then choose the data center you want to run this from.
As you can see, because of Azure's worldwide foot print,
you have a diversity of data centers to run from.
Let me choose Central US.
And all I do is press Create.
Now, this will deploy a large number of Azure services at the back end,
which will start spinning up the solution architecture.
This will take approximately 20 minutes.
During this time, different services, including Azure HDI,
Blob storage, Azure SQL DB, Azure machine learning will be spun up, so
that this whole solution will be spinning in your own Azure account.
Obviously, there will be data generated, as well to try it out,
to test this moderate.
And we had a large number of trained SI partners who will help you deploy
the solution for a quick POC and operationalizer, if required.
Thanks again for your time.
Back to you Esther.
>> Thank you Kabir.
The personalized offer solution template helps you improve response
rates with personalization.
You can predict and deliver the best performing offer based on
the customer's unique profile and past behaviors.
This solutions template gives you the ability to promote custom
offers with three targeting in outbound campaigns, to increase
marketing spend effectiveness, and tailor landing pages and
content to deepen engagement and improve offer response rate.
Now let's take a look at some finished software as a service apps.
One of our partners is Neal Analytics.
Can you imagine knowing exactly which are the right products to put
on which shelf at every store while considering ever-evolving
customer demands?
That's what this solution does.
It helps determine the best performing SKUs in each outlet or
market, models this across customer and product segments, and provides
valuable insights for retailers and consumer packaged good companies,
ultimately driving a significant increase in sales and revenue.
Let's take a look at another partner.
Brillio Optimix lets you build what if scenarios to optimize budget
allocation and evaluate promotion effectiveness in real time.
You can identify which marketing spend is driving ROI and sales lift,
and hence, optimize future marketing mix to achieve maximum impact for
the business.
Brillio Retail Shelf Scanner enables our customers to achieve real-time
insights by leveraging data science to analyze trends by store,
region, retailer, and even individual brands.
You can track and forecast inventory and stock availability, and
analyze competitive and commercial opportunities.
This solution also allows you to identify patterns and
root causes to act swiftly on compliance issues.
Another new solution built on top of Microsoft Cortana Intelligence
is Cognizant OneRetail.
This solution gives retail customers a 360 degree view
of the connected retail organization.
You can easily get an integrated view of different insights,
descriptive and predictive, across the breath of functions,
supply chain, store and marketing.
There is a guided analytics experience based on your
usage pattern.
Another application to help retail marketers is from Flintfox.
The upcoming Flintfox Pricing & Promotion Execution app allows
retailers to leverage dynamic pricing to grow the bottom line.
Our customers can efficiently manage and execute complicated pricing and
discounting and
provide a single source of pricing truth to all channels.
This solution helps drive incremental sales and
margins accurately through targeted promotions.
We've looked at several examples of partners that are building solutions
that take the wealth of data you collect and do something valuable
with it, giving you real time and intelligent insights, so you can
make decisions faster, better, and with more data driven confidence.
Retail customers can accelerate their time to value with
Microsoft Advance Analytics because of our solution-driven approach.
We want to take care of the heavy lifting so
that you can use the built-in intelligence capabilities
of our solutions to add value as soon as possible for your business.
Our applications and templates are built on the secure and
trusted Azure platform.
And finally,
we want to work with you wherever you are in your analytics journey.
Our solutions will work with what you have, any platform,
any language, on-premises and cloud.
It's easy to get started.
Most of the solutions that we discussed today have accessible
demos and trials.
To find out more, go to the Cortana Intelligence Gallery and
learn about the new retail vertical solution templates.
And get started with the retail finished solutions at
AppSource.microsoft.com.
Thank you for watching.
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