6 Keys to Smarter Cross Channel Integration

Cross Channel Integration:

In order to have true visibility you need a retail intelligence system that will integrate and roll up the information from all of these disparate systems to provide you with a real-time, integrated, enterprise view of metrics and KPIs across your entire company – its channels, products, regions, operations, and customer segments.

In the past, this would have required a massive business intelligence (BI) initiative and a significant investment, involving numerous software packages, systems integrators, data architecture decisions and implementation projects. Today, new technology and business models are available that are quicker and easier to implement at a fraction of the cost.

A Prescription for Getting the Insight to Set You Apart
This white paper outlines six key ingredients to focus on when evaluating technology solutions for multi-channel integration. Finding the right retail intelligence system to provide you with greater visibility into your business’ performance starts with:
1. Information you can depend on and everybody trusts
2. One shared view across your company from executives to functional teams
3. Alignment with how you do business today and the flexibility to change as you grow
4. Visibility in weeks, not months or years
5. Minimizing the impact on IT so resources can shift to other high impact projects
6. Finding one provider for the entire system so you are not the general contractor

1. Do you believe your numbers?
How many different groups produce the same metrics? How often are the numbers the same? Who has the definitive source of truth? How much time to you spend reconciling different numbers for the same metric? Retailers are overwhelming their organizations with metrics, measures, key performance indicators, reports and dashboards. These come from different systems, teams of analysts, the finance group and the data warehouse. The result is that people believe their own metrics and not those from others. Or worse, nobody believes any of the metrics and business continues to operate on gut feel.

One Version of the Truth
If you don’t have to spend time questioning the accuracy of your data, you can focus on what to do with it. To move to one version of the truth, you need one system where everybody goes for information that has unquestionable accuracy. Traditionally this was an enterprise data warehouse; however, data was often phased in overtime which resulted in incomplete information.

To provide a single system that everybody trusts, you need to ensure that the following key capabilities are in place:
- One system where everyone goes to access the information
- Assurances that the data loaded into the system at the start and the daily updates are cleansed, ensuring accuracy
- Security and role-based access so people can only see what they are allowed to view
- A trusted location, preferably not residing in any single department
This calls for a highly secure, highly accurate set of data that anybody can access, based on their level and role in the organization. Until recently, this was merely a dream. Today it is reality.

2. Can you see your business from top to bottom?
Are your executives and functional teams looking at the same data? Are the merchandise managers, inventory planners, catalog marketers and financial analysts looking at one set of data from the same source? And when you identify a problem, can you easily drill into the business to find out its source? It is difficult to get one view of the business from all different angles.
- Executives and functional managers want to see the same data with the same metrics. However, executive dashboards are built for executives and functional dashboards are built for functional teams – often from two different sets of data.
- Vice presidents want to view their function with a complete set of data – some that sits in their department and much that sits outside of it.
- Data needs to be viewed inside out. Once an issue is raised, you need a direct path to the data to discover root causes.
Often each function is looking at data from systems that sit within its control. For example, merchandisers not only want to know demand for each product, but inventory on hand, in transit and open to buy. They want product margins that account for costs beyond vendor cost. 

Learn more about cross channel integration.