Reporting back from #NRF17 in New York. Outstanding show with nearly 35,000 attendees. This year, the hottest areas were
- Analytics
- In-Store Customer Interactivity
- Omni-Channel
The core, is Analytics. With data now being collected on every aspect of our lives both on and off the Internet, the goal is to figure out what it means. We are now in the age of looking for the golden needle in the haystack, and that haystack is huge – terabytes and more – just inside a single enterprise.
Not simply finding trends, but the trend of trends is where the magic is. And once we know that, we can predict not just where to be next, but when to be there and we we might go after that.
But first, it is in the data and the best place to find real-time trends is in the on-line store and tracking all the way through drop ship to delivery. By mashing up a company’s EDI supply chain transactions with external sources including demographics (e.g. US Census Data) and carrier APIs (e.g. FedEx, UPS, USPS), we can build a picture of cradle to grave ordering – and by looking at millions of these transactions – trends and trends of trends can be found – and be made actionable.
I have been working closely with Enhanced Retail Solutions, based in the heart of the Garment District in NYC. Seeing our customer’s EDI data pop on the screen with trend charts and graphs is magical. Their CEO, Jim Lewis, is a former buyer for J.C. Penny’s, and he has used his domain experience and a great technical team to build functional, actionable solutions for both buyers and sellers.
I suggest you check them out – and don’t forget Loren Data for your unified EDI VAN and AS2 solution in the cloud with ECGridOS Web Services for EDI Service Providers and Retail Hubs.
-=tg=-