This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Epicor Retail Business Intelligence 2.0 helps retailers gain a clearer view across their enterprise.
Epicor Software Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise business software solutions to the midmarket and Global 1000 companies, has announced the newest version of its retail Business Intelligence (BI) solution, Epicor Retail Business Intelligence 2.0, which provides new and enhanced features to help retailers gain critical and timely business insight to gauge and improve execution and assist in enterprise decision-making. In addition to a new enhanced user interface that supports streamlined and intuitive information access, new features include an extended data model encompassing a broader range of retail operations across the enterprise.
Additionally, Epicor Retail BI 2.0 now supports the ability to integrate customer-defined external data elements. With this capability, retailers can further extend their data model, enabling them to access and analyse critical information and gauge performance across a broad range of data streams. Epicor Retail BI 2.0 features a sophisticated retail data model powered by Microsoft business intelligence (BI) tools. Using a data warehouse and cube optimised for queries, the solution supports custom reporting with automatic drill downs, rich analysis capabilities, dashboards to monitor critical business metrics, plus a variety of direct action tools.
"The new features in our Epicor Business Intelligence 2.0 solution gives retailers greater insight across retail operations for improved management and business execution," said David Henning, executive vice president and general manager for Epicor Retail. "The expanded functionality gives retailers the ability to react to changing market conditions, identify customer segments and improve purchasing, forecasting and profitability while optimising overall store performance."
"Business intelligence is absolutely essential given the current state of the economy, and retailers operating on very thin margins cannot afford wrong guesses about trends and customer needs -- all of which can have an immediate and devastating impact on profits and even viability," said Sahir Anand, retail research director at Aberdeen Group. "In addition to making better buying and merchandising decisions, access to business intelligence can help retailers be more strategic in areas such as store layout. For example, by understanding how product affinities work and applying the rules of suggestive selling, retailers can place low-selling products next to a related product that is a strong seller to increase their conversion rates and optimise sales. Retailers can also reduce labor costs by ensuring that more employees are on the floor during busy times and less during slower periods."
"Retailers today will benefit from the ability to integrate disparate 'silos' and unlock value by connecting systems that drive new efficiencies and accelerate innovation across global distribution and services networks," said David Gruehn, U.S. retail industry solutions director, Microsoft Corp. "By bringing to the marketplace an integrated and interoperable solution that provides single-version visibility, manageability and usability of a retailer's data, the Epicor Retail BI 2.0 solution empowers retailers to make better business decisions and drive improved performance throughout the organisation, using the familiar Microsoft Office interfaces they work with everyday."
La Senza Leverages BI to Get More in Touch with Customers
One leading retailer leveraging Epicor's new Retail Business Intelligence 2.0 solution is La Senza, which sells lingerie, personal care and beauty products.
La Senza Lingerie is the ultimate shopping destination for a vast array of exclusive high quality branded lingerie at affordable prices. Offering women a unique shopping experience with outstanding lingerie presentation in a beautiful and intimate environment, La Senza offers everything from bras and panties, to sleepwear, loungewear, bodycare and accessories. La Senza Corporation operates more than 320 La Senza Lingerie, La Senza Express, throughout Canada. In addition, 487 La Senza and La Senza Girl stores are operated internationally in 45 other countries through its franchise-operated stores.
"Prior to using Epicor's BI solution, our team spent a lot of time gathering and managing data within our spreadsheet systems," said Martin Thibodeau, Vice President of Information Systems at La Senza. "Utilizing Epicor Retail Business Intelligence 2.0, we now present information instead of data. Our reporting process greatly benefits from Epicor's solution, which results in better decision-making and more efficient use of our resources."
Today, many of the world's leading retailers utilise Epicor Retail solutions and services to become more profitable, productive, competitive and eco-friendly. Epicor's solutions use the .NET Framework, Microsoft's platform for building applications, to improve business operations and meet the evolving merchandise and service expectations of today's cross-channel shoppers. Epicor delivers comprehensive retail management solutions to enterprises in all tiers -- from regional chains to multichannel global brands. Retail customers include hundreds of marquee names, from Aropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, and Ann Taylor to Zales and Zumiez.
About Epicor Software Corporation
Epicor Software delivers business software solutions to the manufacturing, distribution, retail, hospitality and services industries. With 20,000 customers in over 150 countries, Epicor provides integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and enterprise retail software solutions that enable companies to drive increased efficiency and improve profitability.
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