
Retail Omnichannel Analytics
Make decisions to satisfy customers who can shop anywhere, anytime.
Find out how SAS® omnichannel analytics can help guide the customer journey by visiting our booth at NRF 2018.

Apply analytics to every step of the customer journey to improve operations – and customer experiences.
Mobile devices, social networking sites and other technologies have prompted major shifts in customer behavior – so you need to be equally empowered. Just as customers can quickly research products and compare prices through multiple channels, you can respond with relevant offers, competitive prices and the right merchandise. With omnichannel analytics from SAS, you can:
- Turn big data into insight, across all channels. By managing and analyzing data from a wide range of sources, you'll gain a more complete understanding of who your customers are, and what they're looking for.
- Tailor retail efforts to accommodate specific areas. Omnichannel trade area analytics helps you understand customers in defined communities and across multiple channels. As a result, your pricing, sales and marketing are always on target down to the store level.
- Optimize merchandising and store operations. The more you know what customers are looking for, the better you can adjust inventory and make precise decisions about what to stock and when. As operations become more efficient, your sales margins increase.
SAS provides truly integrated technology that's purpose-built for retailers. And with our scalable platform that supports every phase of the analytics life cycle, you'll gain relevant insights that drive key business decisions. With SAS, you'll benefit from:
- Unparalleled analytics expertise. SAS has long been a pioneer in analytics, and we understand better than anyone how to help you infuse analytics into your decision making.
- Data management supporting your processes. Easily merge online and offline customer data for precise insights that can drive better decisions. Our event stream processing technology also helps you analyze data while it's in motion, so you can get instant insights and make quick decisions before data is stored.
- A flexible, scalable solution to analyze big data. Omnichannel analytics from SAS enables you to analyze large amounts of data quickly, for relevant insights into critical business issues.
Learn how omnichannel analytics deliver a unified truth for better customer experiences.
Read solution brief
Discover why smart retailers know omnichannel analytics isn't just about marketing anymore.
Read article
Find out how to use big data to enable the omnichannel retail experience.
Read white paper

Right merchandise, right stores. Right when the customer is ready to buy.
As customer preferences evolve and options for where – and how – they shop expand, you need a better understanding of who your customers are in order to stay competitive. SAS delivers solutions specifically designed for today's retailers, including technology that enables:
- Merchandise assortment optimization. Efficiently rationalize assortments by becoming more customer-centric and less product-centric, using analytics and advanced clustering to understand a customer's path to purchase – and identify missed opportunities.
- Merchandise financial planning. Predict customer demand by channel, and strategically plan key initiatives. Identify opportunities to improve performance, boost customer satisfaction and increase profitability.
- Merchandise location planning. Understand the true omnichannel demand and use automated processes to predict sales by location, optimize inventory and support e-commerce fulfillment initiatives.
- Size/pack optimization. Increase margin potential by understanding historical sales as well as the true size demand by forecasting quantities down to the store/size level. Recommend pack configurations to meet supply chain constraints and distribution costs.
- Revenue optimization. Gain incremental margin by optimizing profitable price strategies over product life cycle. Use analytics to understand competitor pricing, shape demand and meet financial goals.
Learn more about SAS® Integrated Merchandise Planning
Connect to current merchandise planning, allocation or replenishment solutions. Enable an end-to-end retail intelligence solution. Transform your business to meet omnichannel strategies. With SAS, you can:
- Improve key performance indicators. Optimize financial and assortment plans as well as allocation and replenishment strategies.
- Enable better assortment planning. Analytics helps you efficiently rationalize assortments, accurately determine the optimal choice count and understand what items were not in the assortment to identify missed opportunities.
- Localize and drive profitability. Statistically cluster locations based on selling patterns to work more efficiently and maximize revenue.
- Boost in-stock service levels. Meet consumer size demand by making millions of item or location decisions accurately – even down to size.
- Increase profit margins. Optimize profitable pricing strategies over the product life cycle.
- Implement analytics. Visualize insights through graphs, charts and scorecards to make analytics more approachable to business end users.
Learn more about SAS® Integrated Merchandise Planning
Our out-of-stocks are fewer, our markdowns are fewer and our margins are higher – which, at the end of the day, is what every retailer wants.
Discover how to use big data to enable the omnichannel retail experience.
Read white paper
Gartner positions SAS as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Retail Assortment Management Applications.
Read report
Learn the impact of omnichannel methods on merchandising, marketing and the supply chain.
Read white paper

Know exactly what customers want. And make sure they get it.
The new reality of retail is that customers are mobile and have more control over the purchasing process – which means retailers must rethink how to use customer data and insights from analytics to improve customer engagement. SAS solutions can help you:
- Connect with customers in real time. Engage and respond to customer needs instantly with contextual listening and advanced data integration, enhancing the in-store and online shopping experience.
- Sell more. Understand what actions drive transactions and customer value. Know which message or offer is most relevant to your customer – as well as the best way to deliver the message. Personalize interactions to drive the best performance, and integrate the experience across all customer touchpoints.
- Spend less. With an omnichannel approach, you can spend less than your competitors on customer acquisition. Improve the outcome of your marketing interactions by using predictive modeling as the basis for comprehensive integrated marketing.
Priority, rules-based optimization isn't enough. You need true analytical optimization to improve the customer experience, boost response rates and lower campaign costs. With SAS, you can:
- Gain a more complete view of your customers and business. No matter where your data comes from or where it resides – from legacy systems to Hadoop – you can easily access it. Our customer information mapping technology means your data is always available and accessible. And because you can integrate multiple data sources, including IoT, customer, merchandise and location information, you get a more robust understanding of your customer and business.
- Create memorable interactions in real time. Advanced predictive analytics enables analytically driven scoring, segmentation and decision making based on historical and current interactions. When combined with context, you can create memorable interactions across channels in real time.
- Work from one platform. Our end-to-end integrated solution suite helps you work faster and more efficiently.
Rather than mailing every offer to every customer, SAS helps us determine the right people to contact, helping us stay on budget and avoid wasting resources.
Evaluate your current marketing strategy and get suggestions to improve it.
Take assessment
Learn how you can use analytics to understand customer preferences and drive profitability.
Read white paper
Connect with the latest marketing insights.
Read articles

More accurate planning. Down to the individual store level.
For a supply chain to be effective, you need an omnichannel view of customer demand. Where and when will customers want to buy a product? How can you optimize inventory and keep customers happy? Our solutions can help you:
- Solve small, medium or large-scale forecasting needs. With advanced analytics and proven what-if analysis, you can create a process to help answer your biggest business questions.
- Gauge the impact of promotions. Consumer demand is affected by promotions – which, in turn, affects supply chain and inventory needs.
- Optimize inventory. Keeping the right amount of stock in the right locations – from suppliers to warehouses to stores – helps you work efficiently and avoid excesses and markdowns in stock.
Trust the accuracy of your forecasts at scale and in detail. Collaborate internally and with suppliers to plan promotions and price changes. Avoid lost sales, out-of-stocks and missed opportunities that result from inaccurate forecasts. SAS enables you to:
- Improve forecasting accuracy. A patented statistical forecasting engine uses advanced forecasting methods for modeling and forecasting all your products and selling locations.
- Optimize inventory and reduce stockouts. With analytics you can drive product where it's needed most to meet customer demand, plus you can manage the overall costs of inventory.
- Take the guesswork out of forecasting. An unmatched library of retail forecasting models take into account underlying trends, seasonality, promotions, inventory effects and more. The solution automatically selects the best fit model based on each individual time-series, enabling large-scale forecasting.
We’re now able to drill down through customer hierarchies and do things such as integrate the impact of promotions and special offers into the statistical models.
Find out how you can move your organization up the demand forecasting maturity curve.
Read white paper
Discover how next-generation demand management leads to better forecasting.
Read white paper
SAS is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Retail Planning, Q3 2017.
Read report

Give customers relevant, omnichannel experiences – in real time, on their terms.
Gain an omnichannel view of your customers across all devices. Understand, adapt to and anticipate customer needs. IoT solutions from SAS bring together data, analytics and marketing processes to help you:
- Sense customer needs and preferences in real time. Use smart devices to gather location-based information. Then integrate that data with previously known information to form contextual, real-time insights that you can act on.
- Gain a deeper understanding of customer patterns. Merge detailed, online customer behavior data with data from offline channels for a complete customer view that reveals what customers truly need so you can respond in real time with relevant, meaningful offers.
- Provide profitable new services to customers. Combine what you’ve learned from previous customer experiences with what you anticipate about future needs – then take action to seize opportunities ahead of the competition.
- A comprehensive view of your customers and business. Our customer information mapping technology means your data is always available and accessible – no matter where it comes from or where it resides. And you can integrate multiple online and offline data sources, including IoT, customer, merchandise and location information.
- Automated, large-scale forecasting. An unmatched library of retail forecasting models take into account underlying trends, seasonality, promotions, inventory effects and more. The best-fit model is selected automatically based on each individual time series.
- High-performance predictive analytics. Create memorable, personalized interactions – across channels and in real time – using analytically driven scoring, segmentation and decision making based on historical and current interactions, combined with context.
Rather than mailing every offer to every customer, SAS helps us determine the right people to contact, helping us stay on budget and avoid wasting resources.

Keeping customers engaged and happy.
When retailers have a better understanding of who their customers are and what their customers need, everyone wins. That's why Catalina, a digital media company, turned to SAS to help it process large amounts of information without constraints.
SAS Grid Manager helps you create a managed, shared environment for efficiently processing large volumes of data. It enables large businesses to scale their data and still get quick responses – which helps analysts dig deeper for key insights. The end result? Better business decisions, and happier customers.
SAS® Analytics for IoT can improve the customer experience by fusing IoT data with analytics.
Read product brief

