COVID has brought the most rapid and disruptive change to the retail sector since the move to the Internet.

Businesses are being forced to move from wholesale only to retail, or to include delivery and takeaway in their offerings.

This has forced adoption of new systems and processes, meaning that there is increased administration and reporting tasks, putting further pressure on margins.

Continuum help businesses use Alteryx to integrate this new data with their legacy systems to provide real time information to the decision makers to allow quicker response to newly profitable, or costly, activities.

As an example of how we have helped our clients, a large UK tool specialist has operated a large showroom of 10,000+ products for over 60 years, and recently launched their eCommerce channel. Like many fast growing b2c businesses, they struggled with a complex retail buying structure, and the ability to link their Warehouse Management System (WMS) across logistics, supply chain, and marketing functions.

Alteryx serves as the glue between their website and core accounts systems, and departments such as marketing - who once struggled to get meaningful performance data from the WMS – can now glean insights every day.

As you would expect from the name, they are in the tool business, and in common with lots of businesses who appear to be digital, they were not.

Their processes were highly manual, leading to the following challenges for a digital business ;

• Limited understanding of its conversion process

• No customer retention program

• No warehouse management system: 39,000 SKUs without knowing what is in the database and in the warehouse

• Poor quality data with multiple silos and very little automation

Despite all that, it was still doing quite well, 40% year on year growth. It was clear that this business had pedigree and had opportunity. They tried various solutions, but for a small business, the solutions that are on offer, large-scale SAP-style solutions, are expensive, difficult to configure and very difficult to achieve an ROI given the scale of the business.

They began a data-led journey. It started with an Alteryx-friendly design agency who began by crunching the raw Google analytics data to identify the key customers and how to speak to them.

The other piece of work the design agency had begun was migrating from a legacy bespoke e-commerce system to a state of the art Magento enterprise implementation.

They had to reorganise and categorise over 39,000 products. The purchase orders had notes that had to read individually and meticulously to check that every single penny that’s due is paid. Inevitably, the process is error-prone, creating significant discrepancies in stock value and revenue.  

So they created an Alteryx interface to take data in purchase orders from PeopleVox, and add the additional information that they need to be maintained - for example free products. When they were satisfied that all data fields were configured, they would write that to a draft bill in PeopleVox.

Now with Alteryx, in the time that it would take me to write the requirements analysis, they wrote an interface, with help from Continuum, so all the product inventory with pricing content details,was published as a purchase order from PeopleVox together with full inventory details to Xero.

They are streamlined, scalable and agile, the whole thing done in Alteryx in under a week!

This is just one example of how Continuum have used the power of Alteryx for a retail customer to improve their MIS and stock processes. We have also been working with a top 5 UK supermarket to assist them with a data migration exercise, some of these problems may be familiar. More recently we have assisted in getting them connected to the Deliveroo network and creating a Time Forecasting model - watch a video explaining this work on our YouTube site.

There are many retail use cases which can be viewed on the Alteryx site:

Sainsbury’s Alters Everything with Alteryx

Wolsely Plumbing and heating supplies

Walmart Leveraging Alteryx to Identify and Mitigate Fraud

Using Weather Data to Predict Retail Sales

Continuum would love to show you how to improve your retail systems - Contact the Experts!