What Makes POS Data So Difficult to Integrate? Reason 2.
Business Analysts in the Consumer Goods Industry have the added complexity of integrating internal data with data from outside sources. In our last infographic, Reason #1 discussed issues related to multiple retailers providing various data elements.
Reason #2 is that different sources are not equally reliable. Maybe you expect to get an EDI file from CVS on a nightly basis. What happens when it doesn't show up? Maybe a data provider was supposed to send data and it wasn't in the directory you expected it to be in when you arrived. Why? What happened? Was it our servers fault, was it the VAN's fault. Did something go wrong on the retailer end, on our end or somewhere in between?
Maybe the data showed up, but two hours were missing from last week. Maybe a major holiday was missing. Sometimes the retailer portals go down. Relational Solutions put this infographic blog series to help consumer goods analysts and IT folks explain data reliability issues, and other complexities associated with POS, to your management.
Follow our 10 part series that explains other issues related to POS data and what makes it so difficult for analysts to work with. Share your experience on Twitter by following #WhatsYourStory And understand other issues that plague your CPG Analysts & Data Scientist peers.