SAS announces what's in store for retail software in 2004 and beyond

SAS Institute has announced the creation of a new global retail business practice and a new retail industry sales and professional services unit in the US.

The company also unveiled plans for new software solutions that target the unique needs of the retail industry, following the success of SAS intelligence solutions for the telecommunications, banking and insurance sectors.

"The new retail units and the development of the new solutions form part of SAS's strategy to lead the worldwide market in retail analytic and optimisation software," says Steve G Harris, Sales Development Manager at SAS Institute SA. He notes that the announcements represent a natural progression for SAS after its acquisition of Marketmax in October 2003.

"We've sought the input of retail customers globally in the creation of this business unit and the feedback has been extremely positive," says Harris. "They are enthusiastic that we understand that retail faces its own set of challenges distinct from other industries and that SAS is capable of addressing these.

"We've been hearing from retailers that the ideal solution marries customer intelligence and merchandising, but until now there were no integrated offerings in the market. Understanding cross-channel customer buying habits is critical to every merchandising decision from selecting the assortment, to pricing, promotion, forecasting sales, placement and replenishment of products," says Harris.

With the Marketmax acquisition, retailers have a single source for the linkage of customer insight and merchandise intelligence.

"SAS can provide an end-to-end retail analytics, forecasting and optimisation suite that will fuel merchandising decisions with targeted customer intelligence. By focusing on optimising all our customers' key profit drivers, we intend to revolutionise the retail intelligence market," he adds.

In addition to Retail Merchandising Intelligence and Customer Intelligence, SAS intends to lead the retail revenue management space - sometimes also known as price optimisation. Later this year, SAS will roll-out the first of three packaged applications that address the needs of retailers in one of the most mission-critical decision areas of the business - pricing.

"Retailers wrestle with three types of pricing problems; regular or everyday pricing, promotional pricing and clearance or markdown pricing. SAS technology is currently widely used by many blue chip retailers to analyse and optimise pricing strategies in each of these scenarios. It is a natural next step to bring these applications to a market that is ripe for this type of solution," says Harris.

Few solutions in the market today support promotional planning and none supports new product pricing. SAS's promotion planning application, also scheduled for delivery later this year, will help retailers predict the increase in sales, or uplift, from promotions. It will also help analyse the effectiveness of past promotions in terms of profitability and objectives. With powerful forecasting and analytics, it will help reduce the number of errors in promotion and pricing decisions.

Packaged applications and consulting services will address the areas of customer insight, supply chain cost transparency, promotional effectiveness and overall scorecarding.

"SAS's intelligence solutions will provide retailers with retail-specific data models, logical models, metadata and business rules based on industry standards that have been perfected over more than 25 years of experience," Harris concludes.