SAS^® Intelligent Clustering for Retail

SAS Intelligent Clustering for Retail brings enhanced analytic precision to assortment planning, enabling retailers to target the unique demands of local markets and achieve new operational efficiencies in the process.

In the Spotlight SAS Intelligent Clustering for Retail Fact Sheet Enable customer-centric merchandising with a highly automated solution that clusters stores based on demand patterns.

Based on actual demand patterns – and attributes such as customer demographics and physical store traits – the software identifies and profiles store clusters that warrant tailored assortments. Because SAS Intelligent Clustering for Retail integrates tightly with SAS Merchandise Assortment Planning, it feeds that intelligence directly into the planning process – so that stores with similar demand patterns can be easily planned together.

You get a highly automated solution that facilitates tailoring product selection to local market demand without expending the considerable resources required to design assortments for every store.

Benefits: Increase revenue and inventory productivity. SAS Intelligent Clustering for Retail helps you tailor assortment plans for each cluster with similar demand patterns. Tailored assortment plans better meet customer demand – driving top-line sales and maximizing inventory productivity. Exploit previously hidden strategic business drivers. SAS Intelligent Clustering for Retail teases out significant characteristics of clusters that might have been previously unobserved, including customer age, product feature preferences, income and price sensitivity. Improve assortment planning accuracy and efficiency. SAS intelligence clustering routines can be triggered by a plan from within SAS Merchandise Assortment Planning. This combination of analytic insight and automated workflow exponentially improves assortment planning accuracy and efficiency. Enhance planning efficiency for everyday users. The solution includes predefined routines that relieve everyday business users from having to grapple with the underlying analytics. (More sophisticated analytical teams can access the analytics if desired.)

Key Features:

• Statistically Based Cluster Generation – Uses best practice clustering models to cluster stores on the basis of total units sold with filter choices of product, location and date information.
• Cluster Management – Executes clustering requests in batch, online or ad hoc modes, automating the creation of cluster sets for worksheets that are often used in assortment planning.
• Attribute Profiling – Lets users specify attributes for cluster profiles, plots these variables for each store cluster and presents all profiling information in tabular reports that note relevance and distribution.
• Integration with SAS Merchandise Assortment Planning – Provides a seamless workflow that allows clusters to be created and incorporated into an assortment plan.
• "Like Store" Functionality for New Locations – When new stores open, SAS Intelligent Clustering for Retail automatically integrates them into clusters of “like stores” by correlating known attributes.

SAS Intelligent Clustering for Retail is part of the SAS Merchandise Intelligence suite, which provides complete planning capabilities for the merchandising process, including performance analysis, financial planning, assortment planning, space planning, allocation and more.