Retail

Overview

Leading retail organizations worldwide choose Cognos:

Over 300 chains globally rely on Cognos to improve performance.
Cognos solutions are used by 25 percent of the world's top 250 retailers, including general merchandise, supermarkets, conveniences stores, and restaurant chains.

Retail organizations use Cognos software and KPI services to:

Improve visibility and accountability for top controllable expenses like labor and cost of goods.
Communicate sales and margin information across the chain with enterprise-scale reporting.
Identify high or low performing divisions, stores, channels, products, and staff.
Optimize staffing levels through headcount planning and workforce analytics.
Monitor turnover, customer satisfaction, returns, sales trends, and employee utilization through retail scorecards.

Align corporate and store operations around critical revenue and profitability targets.
Provide sales and item movement information to operations, marketing, and merchandising.
Improve customer satisfaction by identifying trends and responding to customer buying needs and behavior.
Optimize profitability by planning and adjusting resources according to cycles-seasonal, calendar, fiscal.

Increase cost savings by comparing and benchmarking product costs and orders across stores, regions, and segments.
Optimize merchandise levels, minimize out-of-stocks, and manage inventory costs through item movement analysis.
Gain visibility into key controllable expense areas across the chain: labor, inventory, Cost of Goods, supplies, and transactions.
Evaluate supplier performance in terms of quality, delivery, and price.

Integrate ERP, merchandising, inventory, POS, and legacy data for a single view of chain-wide performance.
Build a self-service environment for stores, warehouses, suppliers and corporate business users that frees up IT resources and lowers TCO.

Cognos integrated performance management software and KPI services deliver value to the world's leading retailing organizations.

Reporting, analysis, and business intelligence
Cognos offers the most comprehensive business intelligence and reporting coverage in the industry.

You can use BI software to:

Analyze inventory, sales, and item movement data to understand demand and ensure positive in-stock positions.
Analyze consumer and market trends, and react quickly to provide a more positive shopping experience.
Report on performance by store, groups of stores, departments, categories, or individual products to maximize profits.
Share information with key partners and suppliers through a BI extranet.

Scorecarding
Monitor store performance from your desktop.

With Cognos Scorecarding software, you can:

Monitor sales performance by store, region, product, customer, and channel.
Track financial goals in terms of gross sales, gross margin, or unit volume.
Determine what metrics-such as inventory turns, open orders, supplier performance-are on or off track.

Planning, forecasting, consolidation
Cognos planning and consolidation software improves performance in the key aspects of your business.

You can use planning and consolidation software to:

Replace static budgets with rolling forecasts
Support driver-based planning at store-level to increase operations visibility and accountability for sales, labor, and other controllable expenses.
Analyze and identify the most profitable new investments and business initiatives.
Evaluate and support marketing, promotion, and pricing strategy planning.
Fine-tune sales and profitability projections on a weekly or monthly basis.
Streamline and standardize budgeting for financial, operations, and supply chain.