Your business intelligence solution’s main responsibility is to provide you with convenient, efficient and accessible data that allows you to make confident business choices as a result. Does yours fill those needs?
As the 21st century’s technology continues to improve the way businesses are run and the way mobile devices are valued, it’s only right that these two enhancements have found a way to integrate and impact your decision making.
How confident are you in your current data gathering methods? Is it taking longer for your team to interpret your data because you have tricky graphs, charts and projections? When was the last time you considered replacing your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software?
In today’s age of business, there are several resources for the workplace that aim to help you run your business easier and more smoothly. And if you’re in the market for a business intelligence (BI) solution to capture and analyze your company statistics, there are some important factors you must consider before investing in a long-term addition to your business.
If you’re a new business, there will be several BI specialists who are anxious to persuade you to sign up for their services, partners and affiliates. However, if your goal is to find the perfect BI solution independent of any influences, let us give you an objective starting point. Here are five important characteristics to take into account during your search.
One of the most valuable pieces of information in the Convenience Store industry revolves around your customers’ buying habits, their market basket analysis. Understanding your customers’ behaviors to develop effective merchandising strategies is key to protect and increase profits. Market basket analysis allows management to quickly and easily look at the size, contents, and value of their customer’s market basket to understand the patterns in how products are purchased together, or basic product similarities.
Business Impact’s business intelligence solution offers market basket analysis that can deliver near-instant results to encourage interactive analysis, enabling managers to drill down into customer buying patterns over time to precisely target and understand specific combinations of products, departments, brands, categories, sub-categories, and even time of day.
How Convenience Stores are leveraging Market Basket Analysis:
And a ton more!!!
Business Impact has exceed their customers’ business intelligence reporting and analytics needs with offering additional key point indicators that could add additional value. The beauty in this customized solution includes flexibility and ease of use that in turn offers capabilities to click and compare a variety of items or just one item to each store or one store, year to month to day, the data is all there, just select what you want and dynamically observe the store’s performance.
Watch this video for more information on market basket analysis for convenience stores.
The glory days where distributors offered full guarantee on all spoilage seems to be gone and in general we see a trend of more and more activities being pushed downstream and your convenience store purchasing data is becoming more and more important to your profitability. We see store owners struggling to cope with:
Meanwhile, the environment is also changing and fuel efficient cars lower the frequency of opportunity, which only increases the opportunity cost caused by poor purchasing practices.
While analyzing the in-store data, what are your determining factors that identifies if a product should be rebought? At what quantities? Or should a product be terminated from your price book? How do you review your collected information with your distributors to negotiate better rebates or incentive programs? Is the speed of reporting appropriate or are your data reviews taking too long and causing stores to stock out on high margin products, ultimately costing you real dollars?
Here at Business Impact, we offer a solution that can take control of your convenience store purchasing data. Business Intelligence is a growing need for all and we are focused on your industry to deliver reports and analytics like you’ve never seen before. Our solutions offers flexibility and interactive interface that makes it simple to roll up daily data to week, month, quarter, then drill back down… or go from store totals, then drill down to category, sub-category, employee, etc… It’s all up to the user and being able to easily and quickly display the data they are needing to discover the information they are looking for.
Here’s how we can help:
Understanding the c-store environment, we have successfully deployed solutions as well as offered additional requirements that may have once been overlooked. Don’t rely on your distributors’ data that may be inaccurate and possibly cost you missed rebates. Automated pattern recognition and alerts will help increase your ability to predict high margin products stock levels, quickly allowing your team to discover which items may be a loss leader, or a hidden gems that deserve better placement. Improve your ability to strike a healthy balance between profitability, inventory cost and sales flow by comparing across regions, districts and stores. Analyze Inside Sales per square foot by department or category or whatever else you desire. See average market basket of any transaction that has a Coke in it. Or any Coke product. Can you compare that with Pepsi? We can! You never have to go into a distributor meeting unarmed. Have your convenience store purchasing and sales data at your fingertips.
Automating the collection and organization of your data for usage is a large part in any successful BI solution. We pull the necessary data from the back office systems and other data sources. Data can come from your accounting package, spreadsheets, a labor system, or somewhere else. We focus on what adds most value, the ease of use, flexibility and performance is the design and management of this organization for delivery.
Check out our latest three minute video demonstrating convenience store’s Inside Sales Analysis. Or contact us to learn more!
All convenience stores are aware of the impact of waste on profitability. At the corporate level, are you getting access to the waste data in a timely fashion so you can quickly remedy the situation? Store Managers are often head down busy, and don’t see how much waste is nipping at the toes of your profitability. A Business Intelligence solution brings your numbers to light, and makes sure everyone is meeting the profitability goals per store. Quickly your convenience stores increase profits through waste management and reduce your spoils, by getting the right information to your team at the right time.
In today’s C-store environment with slim fuel margins, executive teams need to efficiently capture inside sales margin dollars in order to survive. There are many ways to analyze how to cut costs and save, but how accurate is your reporting, and not to mention, how long did it take to get those results??? A business intelligence solution allows your organization to see how much waste is happening at each store, compared to every other store, compared to last year, compared to last week, compared to…well, you name it. The beauty is that the data already exists, but combine that with the flexibility, unique metrics and TA-DA, now you can access this information in a dynamic “on the fly” way. You can see that hot dogs, cups, coffee, or sandwiches are being scrapped at a higher level then what’s allowed; and management can make actionable decisions to get things back on track before time gets the better of them.
One of our convenience store clients gained profitability by starting to analyze their data on hot dogs. They took a look at what was being sold and what was being scrapped or wasted per store. After a very short period of time (weeks instead of months), they made a business decision to pull roller grills out of certain stores where they were having weak profitability results. There was no reason to keep wasting the hot food items, and in reality wasting the space for other more profitably items. The Management Team agreed it would have taken them a year to make such a decisive decision in the past. Now with the right data, at their fingertips and available to analyze, they came to the decision to pull the roller grills in a timely manner saving tons of waste, time, and sunk cost. They even took it a step further with the locations that kept serving hot dogs and identified the average amount of dogs being served on a daily and timely basis. Further decreasing their waste and saving tons of wieners!
Being able to see the waste and spoils allows a C Store business intelligence client to create PAR level goals at the corporate level for each store. Corporate wide, this C store chain created a “Goal Sheet” with accurate goals for sales, waste, and PAR levels per day per store. Managers at the store can log in and see what their goals are on a daily basis based on historical analysis of their data. They have their goal planned for them from corporate, and can get back on the floor to oversee the team to make those goals happen. Getting this information to the team at the store level helps everyone be on the same page and make the company’s waste and spoilage goals happen.
Loss prevention analysis not only helps you control and track your spoilage, but it will lead to better purchasing decisions and reassurance that you aren’t over ordering or stocking-out. With the right data, Store Managers can better account for items, and be sure to keep up on inventory goals.
To learn more about how convenience stores increase profits through waste management and other areas, contact us! We’d like to share more stories that can benefit your convenience store business.
