Real-Time Data: Adapt to new realities

The use of real-time data analytics is one solution that has the potential to address the challenges that businesses face in the new now. By taking advantage of this type of data businesses can:

• Increase the visibility of their entire supply chain

• Connect with customers on a more personal level

• Track customer and market trends

• Improve the customer experience across the entire buying process

Cutting Through The Noise

While it's always important to listen to customers, nothing gives a real sense of a situation like data.

According to Statista, many industries saw a drastic drop in sales between February and March of this year, and many consumers intend to decrease their net spending on certain products.

Imagine if you could have an insight into the behavior of your customers. With this insight, most of the challenges associated to market fluctuations or trends would be mitigated. Allowing you to invest more resources into promoting products that hold a healthy demand.

A beauty brand, for example, might see an overall downturn in online visits, but data might show there's a high demand for certain products they sell. Seeing this change in buyer behavior gives the business a chance to react and potentially to pivot to a new trend.

Looking to the future is an important part of being an adaptable business and helps identify situations and scenarios where a change in strategy might be required. It's the collection and analysis of data that gives businesses the ability to forecast when these changes might be necessary.

Importance of Analyzing Trends

Whether in response to “The New Now” or more generally, businesses can identify purchasing habits both online and in-store, which is useful in predicting trends. It helps to make better decisions related to buying, merchandising, and messaging in the future.

A well-recognized example is how Amazon uses real-time trend data and AI (artificial intelligence) to adjust pricing to reflect supply and demand, as well as to choose how it serves ads to buyers. While small businesses might not be able to immediately implement something as complex, real-time data can help analyze buying patterns on a smaller scale.

As retailers now face longer lead times on in-demand products from suppliers, real-time data can help predict when to re-order. Avoiding being out of stock helps maintain sales and customer interest.

Looking to the future, as businesses collect more data, it becomes valuable to maintaining the efficiency of supply chains as well as predicting seasonal trends and changes in product availability.

For example, here is where solutions such as Epicor Data Analytics or Epicor Data Discovery would help your organization to facilitate the analysis of real-time information gathered through the use of Epicor ERP.