Achieving retail success with Snowflake's data cloud warehouse

Retail is data intensive

It’s no secret that successful retail organizations heavily rely on data to improve operational efficiency, enhance the customer experience and streamline decision making.

Typical areas where retailers can gain significant advantages include some of the following:

• Promotions and Marketing Campaigns: Data is used to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and promotional activities. Analyzing customer responses to different promotions helps optimize future marketing strategies.
• Customer Analytics: Customer data can shed a light on shopping patterns, preferences, and behaviors. Equipped with this information, retailers can create personalized messaging and marketing strategies, improve customer experiences, and optimize their product offerings.
• Inventory Management: Efficient inventory management is critical for retail success. Data is used to track inventory levels, predict demand, and avoid stockouts or overstock situations. This helps in optimizing supply chain operations and reducing costs.
  
  

Mind the data

The examples above indicate there is no shortage of opportunities to leverage data to improve your performance. However, effective data use requires a robust and modern data landscape. The center of any data strategy is, of course, a data warehouse. In the past, building and operating a data warehouse in retail was a complex and expensive undertaking. Moreover, depending on the nature of your business, data volumes can be very high, and data protection requirements are stringent. Meanwhile there is a significant need for speedy insights delivery.

This is where the modern cloud data warehouse, as offered by Snowflake, comes into play. No longer are data volumes or compute resources a bottleneck. What was expensive or impossible to do just a decade ago is now the new normal. To stay competitive with its use of data, retailers need to continue investing their data warehousing capabilities. Doing so will provide a number of benefits:

Modern cloud data warehouse provides the scalability needed to accommodate growing data volumes without any costly capital investment. Regardless of your size, the cloud allows you to scale up or down based on your data needs, ensuring your infrastructure aligns with the pace of your business growth.

In the fast-paced world of retail, timing is everything. Having insights available nearly in real-time ensures retailers can promptly respond to market shifts, capitalize on trends, and address emerging challenges. Once again, Snowflake provides the ability to quickly scale resources up or down when you need to. There is no upfront investment and delay.

Maintaining on-premise data infrastructure can be a costly affair, both in terms of capital expenditure and operational expenses. Cloud data warehouses offer a more cost-effective solution by eliminating the need for extensive hardware investments and reducing the burden of ongoing maintenance. Retailers can pay only for the resources they use, making it a flexible and economical choice for businesses of all sizes.

Data security is paramount in the retail industry, where customer trust is integral to success. Cloud data warehouses like Snowflake comes with advanced security features and protocols, safeguarding sensitive information from unauthorized access. Moreover, this can help retailers comply with data protection regulations, ensuring customer data is handled with the utmost care and in accordance with industry standards.

Cloud data warehouses centralize data storage and facilitate collaboration among different departments within a retail organization. Whether it's marketing, sales, or supply chain management, having a unified data platform enhances communication, reduces silos, and promotes a holistic understanding of the business among team members. This streamlined approach leads to improved efficiency and more cohesive decision-making processes.

Have we mentioned AI yet? Everybody talks about this, everybody wants to ‘do something’ with it. But let’s face it: technology alone won’t make you successful. First of all, you need to understand what you are aiming to achieve. Then you need to have the number one ingredient for success with AI: Data. Clean & up-to-date data. A cloud data warehouse makes a significant contribution towards provisioning of this ingredient.

Agile Data Engine allows you to accelerate results

Building and operating a Snowflake cloud data warehouse can be a significant effort if not managed correctly. That’s where Agile Data Engine comes in. Our platform allows organizations to automate and streamline development and operation.

Finland’s two largest retailers, S-Group and Kesko, have been relying on Agile Data Engine (ADE) for a number of years. Where some companies rely on a complex patchwork of tools, ADE provides them with a single platform to automate key processes such as model design, data pipelines, workflow management and deployments. All this happens with a low code approach which significantly increases collaboration between teams and also increases overall development speed.

Valuable Resources

Does this sound interesting? Take a look at the following resources that you might find valuable:

• Customer Case Study: Data helps Kesko deliver on its promise “for shopping to be fun” 
• White Paper: The modern Data Warehouse. A comprehensive guide.
• Customer discussion: Hear from S-Group’s Eevi-Inkeri Forsman as she discusses experiences with other customers.