EIT Street Smart Retail

The ambition of this project is bringing to market an innovative big data analytics service for customer-consumer retail organizations that will enable strategic marketing and individual retailers to analyze in a single dashboard all their most crucial omnichannel data, flexibly optimizing category management in response to consumers’ behavior, at multiple scales in space and adaptive to market seasonality. It will give the best possible support to digital-based location analysis in retail, e.g enabling detailed hot-spot analysis from street smart experience in single shops or malls to geomarketing. A unified solution for these analyses is deeply needed by individual retailers and strategic marketing to overcome the current lack of data-driven decision capability and possible hurdles due to legacy software. This is also crucial for the development of the street smart environments that are the object of this activity. The service developed in this catalyst will plug into the Digital Retail Suite (DRS) an evolution of the DataExpress data analytics dashboard developed for UNIFARM by the FBK Predictive Models team. UNIFARM SpA, which will participate as industrial stakeholder partner with headquarters in Trento. We propose to evolve the DataExpress dashboard into a service for omnichannel business, with a focus on enabling the opportunities of street smart retail in the physical stores. As a first business launch result, the DRS DataExpress (DRS-AaaS) extension will be adopted by UNIFARM. As a second and more general result, FBK is fully committed to evaluate and possibly commercialize DRS-AaaS for other consumer retail organizations (e.g. franchising chains) in other application domains. In particular, we see a clear opportunity to apply DRS-AaaA to supermarkets chains, i.e. Globus in Germany and COOP in Italy. Element of strength for business opportunities in this domain are the availability of homogeneous data streams and the scalability of the DRS-AaaS solution, which will be implemented as a cloud service. The dashboard we propose is based on the concept of “actionable graphics”, i.e. a direct interaction to millions of data points through graphics and a smooth, almost invisible adoption of data mining methods and predictive models. We can provide interactive graphical displays on which customers can find their most important KPIs, easily visualize the positioning of their profiles vs other competitors, explore opportunities by simulation. In DataExpress, store profiles are described in real time from 300M purchases from 200K possible references. The graphs and the elements of the dashboard enable data mining tools designed for strategic marketing, analysis of categories, co-sales analysis, KPI indicators, response to campaigns. Remarkably, the same platform with increasing levels of visibility of data and functions is offered from individual stores to strategic marketing. This will enable to study the penetration of omnichannel services at all physical levels of the organization. In particular, we expect to analyse by appropriate graphics the retail space in terms of key performance indicators and categories that profile together customers and consumers. This profiling tool will be used in simulation mode to explore the potential of an affiliate shop by modifying the category portfolio to better match the consumer’s base. One of the most innovative aspects of this catalyst will be the application of such simulations in the emerging omnichannel context, including all the location based information. In this vision, connecting DataExpress to the DRS ecosystem has a tremendous potential for UNIFARM and for the stakeholders in the SSP action line. In particular, UNIFARM has full just-on-time capabilities (delivery to any shop for next half working day) for their network of affiliates and we intend to offer strategic high resolution geomarketing solutions matching the digital data of consumer behaviors. Particularly important are hot spot and access (in site, near site) analysis being developed in the SSP suite and the new dashboard will include WebGIS functions for such analyses. FBK will develop the DRS-AaaS in close collaboration with UNIFARM SpA strategic marketing team. The integration with other AaaS and BaaS modules will be made easily by the fact that DataExpress services are totally delivered as cloud applications (currently on AmazonCloud EC2, including backend, front end, all mirrored in the FBK data center). High importance will be given to collaborations with partners in streaming data processing and big data and at least 0.5fpe will be placed at the Berlin CLC to ensure appropriate integration with the current DRS components.