Scan-Data Information Essential for Independents Success.

07.10.11

The major chains have been at it for years while independent retail groups are relative novices when it comes to using sales data to measure, identify and anticipate the shopping habits of our retail customers.

There is good reason for this.

Whilst it is possible at a single store, the problem for a retail group or indeed an entire retail channel is that it becomes almost impossible because of the many different point-of-sale (POS) and back office systems (BOS) in use across independent grocery, liquor, convenience and fuel groups.

The likelihood of removing competition from the retail technology area by having all independents adopt the one POS system is almost impossible, and in any case would be many, many years away.

The holy grail of FMCG retailing is to constantly anticipate sales movement, whether increasing or decreasing, both being of equal importance. Indeed the effect of seasonal and social events, price and promotional activities, not only in our own stores but at those of our competitors are all extremely valuable.  In other words; the shopping habits of our customers and how it may be affected.

Achieving some measure of this delivers substantial improvement to inventory performance in terms of costs, sales and profit margins, resulting in incomparable benefit to the business bottom line.

The difficulty has always been that for a group to get a real picture of their customers buying habit and trends does require a substantial cross section of information from many stores across various demographic and geographic areas, and for groupings by store size, range, location, and even competitors.

Since 2003 Bas-X EDI has led the way in the retrieval and integration of scan data from all the major back office systems (BOS) and currently provides its services to Metcash for the IGA Scan+plus program now installed in IGA Supermarkets in all five mainland states and the northern territory

Bas-X EDI offers a fully outsourced and automated data retrieval and integration service and comes standard with performance benchmarking and business intelligence tools.  The report builder allows the retailer to create any report and schedule it for automated generation and distribution to any email address. The reports can be a spreadsheet or a flat HTML document and scheduled to recur hourly, daily, weekly or to generate whenever a preset threshold is exceeded, for example sales, margins, inventory, QOH, cashier functions etc, etc.       

POS Transaction Data – The Next Step.

Up until now most data collection has been from the stores BOS system which in effect is a “daily” snapshot of sales performance.

Bas-X can now offer the collection of POS transactional data from any POS system simultaneously and in real time.

This opens up tremendous opportunity for the data mining of sales performance for those groups interested in basket analysis and actual time of day sales of any product or category.

Bringing management closer to the retail customer is what Bas-X is renowned for.  When combined with all the current products and services, this new service confirms Bas-X reputation for continuing innovation in retail technology. 

Next time we will talk more about POS transactions together with customer loyalty and see what Bas-X can offer your retail group in this important area.

If you would like more information on this or any other Bas-X product please email your enquiry to info@basx.com.au

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