Posted Date: 2/27/2012
5 Steps to Mobile Business Intelligence for Retailers
By David Dorf
While there's been much focus on consumer mobile devices, there's also much to be gained from using mobile devices equipped to help run the business. This is especially true for retailers when critical, day-to-day decision-makers are in the field visiting stores. Imagine a district manager walking into a store with an iPad that will automatically bring up current sales trends, inventory reports or labor productivity for that store, complete with exceptions highlighted and the ability to drill into details.
Business intelligence placed in the hands of mobile works becomes more powerful yet when embedded with the ability to take actions. This type of actionable business intelligence, often referred to as "closed-loop analytics" because it pairs insights with results, is ideal for deployment on mobile devices.
Below are five things for retailers to consider in a mobile BI solution:
- A stand-beside solution is usually sub-optimal, so look for a single solution that supports both enterprise BI as well as mobile BI. Because of the value it can deliver, mobile BI is becoming the standard for most enterprise solutions.
- Your solution needs to support multiple mobile platforms. While you might be planning to deploy an iOS today, you'll want the flexibility to switch to another mobile OS, for example, in the future. You'll probably want to support both smartphones and tablets of various sizes.
- Make sure your solution doesn’t require a redesign of reports to work on mobile devices. Having to maintain multiple rendering of the same reports for different devices is a waste of resources. The solution should automatically reformat on the fly for the particular device. This usually means the use of Web technologies.
- Since you don't want to be staring at reports all day, make sure there's an alerting facility that works on your mobile devices. When an exception occurs, you'll want to be notified so you can drill down into the details. The ability to launch business processes that act on the data is also desirable.
- As a bonus, it's nice to leverage the additional capabilities of the mobile device. For example, use GPS to automatically offer reports of stores nearby, or use the camera to scan a barcode and get a sales report for that product. These types of features are great for field-based management.
It's often said that having the right data at the right time is crucial to making the best decisions, and mobile devices are making data even more readily accessible. For retailers, putting actionable business intelligence in the hands of decision makers will enable better operations from store to warehouse to planning, yielding improvements in sales and performance.
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