The Retailer Winter 2018/19

INCORPORATE WEATHER ANALYTICS IN SPECIFIC PROCESSES TO MAXIMISE BENEFIT The weather is changing all of the time. But retailers cannot spend all of their time monitoring and reacting to it. In fact, with the right analytics, companies can move from thinking about the weather too much to not having to think about it much at all. The key is measuring the impacts broadly across the business and integrating or incorporating Weather-Driven Demand metrics directly into pre-season planning and allocation, replenishment, or digital marketing systems and processes. Limiting the scope to a handful of products or sporadically making manual adjustments to different parts of the business severely limits the benefits a company can achieve. Ideally, a retailer will understand exactly how weather-sensitive sales are for their entire range and then apply weather analytics to any products that are significantly impacted. By scaling and systemically incorporating the analytics to all products that can benefit, retailers adopt a comprehensive, data-driven approach to optimising allocation plans or replenishment forecasts (or other processes) for never-ending weather changes. Integrating Weather-Driven Demand metrics into data warehouses and existing solutions ensures that the weather is being addressed consistently and objectively and that opportunities to drive sales or mitigate risks are not being missed. Leading retailers are doing this today and maximising the value returned to the business.

David Frieberg // dfrieberg@planalytics.com // www.planalytics.com

the retailer | winter 2019 | 31