DataScience (Retailed, Sold)

Digitized Retailer

This is a fictional story, based on some true stories. The true stories are quite impressive by themselves, but I decided to make it even more impressive by adding some color to it. In this story, everything highlighted in "bold" is a capability provided by TIBCO.

A Retailer came to us with an interesting problem and some solution ideas. Their “business problem” was that their consumers were asking them "Mr Retailer, I am standing at the mall and looking at your iPhone app. You know who I am, you know what I have bought from you in the past. Do you have something interesting for me ?"

Retailers typically have what I call "too -late architectures". The consumer comes to the store, makes a transaction which is stored in a database/application somewhere. At some point "too-late" analytics is done and then a letter is sent in the mail to the consumer.

How do you respond intelligently to the consumer in 80 ms or less via iPhone App ?. You want to delight and surprise the consumer and move your inventory at a profit in 80 ms. This is not an easy problem. Don't worry TIBCO is here.

Thanks to TIBCO, they had “BigData” - detailed data sets of consumer behavior for 65 million+ consumers . These data sets had been connected via the TIBCO integration platform that connected legacy apps into a "connected data/event fabric". This was used to build operational analytic dashboards linked to in-memory compute/data grid so that they could optimize consumer experience.

BigData if not managed properly can quickly become Big Data Swamp and can impede business operations, and in some cases lead to you to make sub-optimal business decisions. I coined a term called BIGO to describe this - BIG DATA IN, GARBAGE OUT.

Thanks to TIBCO they had accurate BigData data sets (consumer behavior, inventory data, pricing trends, fashion trends, location based sales). They enhanced these data sets with data sourced from other systems using data virtualization. Data virtualization allowed them to distill out relevant data from myriad of IT systems used to manage the retail operations

Using data sets, they used supervised machine learning to build an ensemble of data science models. These models were fine-tuned using an iterative and collaborative model optimization done by data scientists. These models focused on consumer behavior - what they buy, when they buy, where do they buy it form, and other behavior data. Researchers were able to fine-tune these models to craft a delightful consumer experience linked to their business goals of moving inventory at a profit.

These models were then plugged in connected data/event fabric for  retail operations (store, online and apps). Using  data visualization, they built real time dashboards that were being updated in real time with behavior data. However these dashboards were not just passive displays of information. 

 Thanks to real time streaming analytics built into these dashboards, staff (marketing, sales and retail store employees) were now able to react in real time to consumer behavior and take proactive action to provide a relevant and contextual offer/experience to the consumer.

 Thanks to ingenuity of our customer's data scientists coupled with TIBCO’s products,  they were able to significantly increase revenue by delighting the customer and optimizing their inventory costs.

 This connective fabric also has in-memory data and compute capabilities. This an essential component of real time architectures that need to respond in real time/right time. We want to delight the consumer before she walks away from the retail store.

By using data integration we distilled and moved relevant data to in-memory data/compute grid that enabled real time analytics driven consumer and staff experience. This allowed retail operations to optimize and adjust based on real time events.

 The beauty of this architecture (Digitized Retailer) is that it can be re-used for other use cases as well. For example, they used a similar approach to collaborate with their partners (supply chain, marketing) to share relevant insights via API's.

They are planning to leverage cloud provider (Azure, GCP) to share information and collaborate. This will need cloud-native capabilities to move relevant data to cloud , safe and secure API access and ability to build apps in the cloud that can also leverage on-prem data and applications.

To transform them to a Digitized Retailer we also helped them organize the data about their staff, IOT enabled devices, inventory and their supply chain partners to get a holistic view of Retail operations. We achieved this via master and reference data management. This provided operational staff with seamless access to data they needed with right quality.

 IOT (and upcoming 5G telco standard) is going to help make Digitized Retailer even more efficient. IOT will allow more comprehensive monitoring and optimization of operations and inventory. The connective fabric can connect to IOT-enabled devices/assets in real time.

I mentioned lots of capabilities in this customer journey.

TIBCO has organized these capabilities in various products organized in what we call “CONNECT, AUGMENT, UNIFY” theme. These products work seamlessly work with other via our integration DNA. These products are cloud-native, cloud-neutral (AWS, Azure, GCP) and support hybrid deployment options. These products can also be used via fully managed service (TIBCO Cloud).

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