Integrated offerings deliver extensive insights into customers, supply chain, promotions and corporate performance.

Increasing competition, combined with inflation at a 40 year low, is forcing South African retailers to find innovative ways to sustain profitability.

"Retail profits will have to come from containing costs, improving store productivity, improving supply chain efficiencies, collaboration and smart marketing," says Almarie Rabie who champions retail business development for SAS Institute SA. "Retailers need to offer customers that special something to encourage them to spend more."

According to Rabie, these are compelling reasons for investing in solutions that enable retailers to become smarter and more strategic.

SAS recently introduced a new suite of integrated software offerings that addresses three of the biggest challenges facing retailers: to understand past customer behaviour and predict future buying patterns; to determine the net profitability of products; and to see the effectiveness of promotional campaigns across multiple channels.

"Armed with these powerful insights, retailers can formulate and implement consistent business strategies and performance metrics across the organisation, improve customer service and maximise profitability," says Rabie.

"Retailers today need to contain costs throughout the supply chain, really understand their customers in order to encourage them to spend more, and ensure that they remain profitable in this low inflation era," she says.

The SAS Retail Intelligence Solution comprises four components that represent best practices from SAS's nearly 30 years of experience helping retailers around the world solve these specific problems. At the heart of each solution is SAS's expertise in data management and predictive analytics, essential in enabling retailers to reduce their dependence on gut instinct and year-over-year histories. Underlying the entire suite is the SAS Retail Intelligence Architecture, an 'out of the box' enterprise-wide data model that contains customer, retail outlets, supply chain and transaction information. By reducing implementation time and project risk, SAS's unique architecture speeds retailers' ROI.

"Solving customer needs is at the heart of everything SAS does," says Rabie. "The new suite of solutions, which builds on the acquisition of Marketmax - a leading provider of advanced retail planning and merchandise intelligence software - is a clear reflection of SAS's commitment to retailers worldwide."

The new suite includes the following four components:

* SAS Customer Insight for Retail helps retailers better understand their customers through quantitative analysis, strategic segmentation and behaviour predictions based on customers' demographic, psychographic, transactional and attitudinal data. Additionally, the solution offers retailers the ability to segment and profile stores based on transaction history and trade area demographics. Using SAS's powerful, retail-specific customer analytics, the solution enables retailers to implement optimum marketing and merchandising strategies to increase profitability, improve customer service and overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

* SAS Supply Chain Costing for Retail combines advanced data management and a retail-specific costing methodology. This gives retailers financial visibility into their supply chains by allowing them to consistently measure and analyse the true supply chain costs as products move through distribution centres, stores and customer checkouts. Using this solution, retailers can model alternate scenarios for understanding the financial impact of merchandising and supply chain decisions. SAS Supply Chain Costing for Retail provides companies net product profitability information to help them make fact-based decisions around product assortments, new product introductions, promotions/events and alterations in supply chains.

* SAS Promotional Effectiveness for Retail helps retailers analyse the marketing effectiveness of past promotions against set objectives and predict the success of planned promotions to help forecast demand. The solution lets retailers forecast the impact of promotions on uplift of base volumes by SKU, retail outlet and by the week/time of promotion, thus helping them take appropriate merchandising and marketing decisions.

* SAS Strategic Performance Management for Retail gives retailers the ability to translate business strategy into actions that can be quickly measured and monitored throughout the organisation. This solution includes retail-specific corporate scorecarding, key performance indicators, mapping and knowledge-base visualisation that enable formulation of organisational strategy. In combination with other components of SAS Retail Intelligence Solutions, retailers can surface business intelligence throughout their organisation via a strategic road map that they can use to set corporate targets, monitor performance and support consistent decision-making.

The company plans to add additional solutions to help retailers solve other specific business problems.