The retail sector is under tremendous pressure to hold on to its customers as it faces severe competition from the data-intensive eCommerce industry.
To thrive in this competitive business era, retail businesses must undergo a rapid transition to structure, analyze, and manage their data assets and put them to best use. Only then will retail owners be able to match their customer’s needs and provide an exceptional customer experience.
The primary challenge is to structure, visualize, and manage the enormous volume of business and customer data. This is where Power BI comes in. Using Power BI in the retail industry can help transform retail data into interactive visualizations that allow businesses to derive actionable insights for informed decision-making.
This blog will look at how the retail industry can leverage Power BI dashboards, using it as the game changer to outpace the competition.
How Power BI empowers retailers?
With data intelligence and retail analytics, Power BI for the retail industry helps businesses understand their customers’ buying and selling patterns. It has pertinent features that enable retailers to visualize data based on their needs and goals.
Retailers face challenges in generating reports due to siloed data buckets, delayed data synchronization across the data buckets, data duplication, and manual errors. With its extensive integration features, Power BI helps retailers integrate customer data from various sources and visualize them seamlessly into interactive reports. Retailers can leverage standardized reporting templates and data models to simplify retail report generation.
PreludeSys offers Accelerator for Power BI that consists of plug-and-play retail data models and reporting templates, making it easy for retailers to visualize their disparate customer data easily.
Use cases on how retail businesses can use Power BI dashboards
The comprehensive Power BI retail dashboard includes critical statistics and KPIs that are vital to the retail industry. It gives a transparent, real-time overview of key metrics such as overall sales and profit data across geographies and products sold in any specific timeframe.
All the data and reports you need to run a successful retail business are available in real time on the Power BI dashboard. It pulls retail businesses up to par with eCommerce businesses. Let’s review some examples.
Global store analysis reports
These reports help businesses get a 360-degree view of store sales performance in an intuitive dashboard.
On using this dashboard, a retailer can see the following information:
- Inspect data broken out by regional sales, regions with high sales, product sales, and monthly sales trends.
- View monthly profit figures by region as well as the most profitable customers.
- Visualize real-time sales data based on product categories.
- Check high and low-sales regions.
- Obtain detailed sales reports based on month and year.
- View and analyze data at ease and scale to gain insights into purchase patterns and predict inventory requirements.
Inventory management
To keep pace with customer demands and the competitive market, retailers must completely control their inventory. Inventory management dashboards from Power BI help retailers to know what’s happening in real time and manage inventories efficiently based on alerts to the retailers.
This dashboard helps retailers with the following details
- Immediate alerts when a product goes out of stock
- Check the on-hand inventory details in real-time and place replenishment orders right away
- Inventory details for each product
- View the inventory movement for every month
- A detailed list of the top on-hand products available in your inventory.
Real-time insights on slow moving stock and make the necessary decisions to clear out your inventory.
Customer analysis
Customer experience is the critical element of the retail business that decides the success of any retailer. For a retailer to offer an exceptional customer experience, there should be ample personalization in customer engagement activities.
Customer analysis helps retailers understand their customer’s preferences and buying patterns based on the existing data. Customer analysis dashboards from Power BI help retailers to visualize customer preferences and patterns to derive meaningful insights. These insights help retailers to tweak customer personalization and engagement activities to improve CX.
Customer analysis dashboards enable retailers to
- Effectively identify trends in customer purchase behavior to make the necessary decisions
- Determine the customers at risk of losing and reduce the churn rate based on reports
- Obtain data on how customers respond to advertisements, personalized incentives, and promotions
- Check the total sales for individual customers
- Acquire personal data, effectively target ad campaigns to customers, and check the conversion rates
- Check every customer purchase invoice information
Supplier quality analysis
For a retail business to build a loyal customer base and succeed in the long run, it must deliver high-quality products. This is where suppliers’ scrutiny comes into focus.
Supplier quality analysis dashboards from Power BI help retailers manage their pool of retailers and identify the best providers. Vendors that furnish defective goods or whose products are frequently returned hurt your cost of sales.
This report provides detailed information about every region and supplier that helps you streamline your supply chain.
How PreludeSys assists retail businesses
PreludeSys is a Microsoft Gold Partner and a well-known Power BI expert that helps retail businesses with customized Power BI reports, dashboards, and metrics for the retail industry.
Our team of Power BI experts can predict and shape business outcomes and empower you to make the right decisions. PreludeSys can help businesses leverage Power BI’s true potential and increase operational efficiency.
In addition, PreludeSys has built an Accelerator for Power BI exclusively for the retail industry. This accelerator provides retailers with plug-and-play report generation templates and data models for the retail sector. This helps retailers to accelerate the pace of report generation and visualize retail data for analysis.
Learn more about our Accelerator for Power BI here.
