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SAS addresses shoppers' demands for service while improving retailers' bottom line

By SAS Institute
Johannesburg, 17 Jul 2002

With SA's volatile economic climate, ever-increasing competition and shrinking profit margins are adding to the management issues facing the retail sector.

Added to this is South African consumers' adamant demand for superior customer service and shopping convenience at all times.

The current situation calls for retailers to ensure they offer the same high level of service to all their customers, regardless of whether they are shopping in store, online or via catalogue. Retailers also need to effectively balance the credit risk of their customers with sales volumes, while constantly monitoring market drive, in order to maintain a competitive-edge.

"Not an easy task," says Louis Kloppers, business development manager for the Retail Division at SAS Institute, market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. "To do this, retailers need to integrate all incoming data, from all sales channels, to find out what their customers like as well as what retailers are not paying attention to.

"However, once integrated, measuring this customer interaction generates an enormous amount of data that needs to be managed and analysed to produce valuable knowledge about customers and to develop leading-edge strategies," Kloppers adds.

"It's like trying to drink from a waterfall," says Kloppers. "More and more customer data is becoming available but there is little or no guidance as to what data is important for enhancing overall delivery of customer service."

SAS Institute's solutions enable retailers of all sizes to turn data into knowledge, enabling them to define and drive decisions across the enterprise.

"The solutions perform credit risk management tasks, and offer statistical features and business analytics that enable executives to make informed decisions based on, for example, client spending patterns and customer cash flow logistics," Kloppers adds.

The SAS solutions also assess up-selling and cross-marketing opportunities in a customer-centric manner.

On an inventory management level, inventory spending is cut by the provision of a consolidated view of stock levels in terms of purchase patterns within the business.

Says Kloppers: "Retailers can now ensure inventories are stocked with the right products at the right time, in line with their marketing strategies and campaigns. Results from these campaigns can then successfully be managed thereafter with up-sell and cross-sell initiatives. Furthermore, revenue projections remain on target while lean and mean growth strategies are maintained."

"It is time for retailers to take the tedious steps out of analysing sales trends and forecasting catalogue sales and to let the data speak for itself quickly and accurately, giving retailers the power of intelligence to achieve their competitive advantage and improve their bottom line," he concludes.

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SAS

SAS provides software and services that enable customers to transform data from all areas of their business into intelligence. SAS solutions help organisations make better, more informed decisions and maximise customer, supplier and organisational relationships. Solutions from SAS, the world's largest privately held software company, are used at more than 38 000 business, government and university sites around the world. Ninety-nine of the top 100 companies on the Fortune 500 - and 90% of the Fortune 500 overall - rely on SAS. For 25 years, SAS has been giving its customers The Power to Know. For more information, visit http://www.sas.com.

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