When did data become a barrier to progress?  With countless investments in different data solutions, retailers have become prisoners to their own data.  Years ago it was all about more data and the notion that more was more!  More data will yield better insight, and better insight means more success, right? Analytics, CRM, Bidding Systems, BI, Data Warehouses, Big Data.  That’s the answer, right?  More data and more systems with promise to help retailers understand clicks, conversions, sales, abandonments, drop-off.  You name the metric, today it can be reported on with pretty charts and plenty of up and down arrows.

But what did that sea of data create?

It created:

• Insight to trends, but no action.
• More questions with less answers.
• Uncertainty, as all these systems seemed to show a slightly different story.
• Wasted time during the week and wasted investment in retailer’s key resource, their analysts.

Analysts, who are the gems of the industry, have watched their role shift from strategic players delivering recommendations to their company - to data compilers, report creators and spreadsheet generators.

Mondays are proof of this shift.

Today, retail analysts worldwide will spend their day generating the reports that teams will use to understand performance.  This effort involves reviewing data from their analytics system(s), downloading the KPIs that are critical to measure and attempting to compile them into a single view, typically a large Excel spreadsheet.  They will spend precious time merging those reports with additional reports created by IT colleagues from a BI or data warehouse.  Heaven forbid any of those metrics do not quite match - as this would kickoff an interrogation of the already trusted data assets to determine which one to cut and which makes the final reports distributed company-wide.

To add further complexity, there are several additional data sets that could be layered in - data with campaign performance or promotion analysis that might have been run and (in a perfect world) comparing all findings to their targets and year-over-year comps.  Once this data is available in one or several reporting Excel reports, then comes the challenge of breaking this data out by category, brand or division to identify the top and poor performers.  Next, the daunting task of assembling all of this information in an easy-to-digest document that can be distributed to key members of the organization.  Bringing us to Tuesday, where the teams can meet, discuss and fetch their red and green pens to dissect and analyze the presented data.

Monday - an entire precious day wasted on combining data and generating reports for the organization to review.  No action.  No recommendations.  No certainty.  Just data handcuffs.

If retailers are going to get ahead, they need to reimagine their week.  Monday cannot be wasted on the task of report generating.  Isn’t that why retailers invested in all those fancy systems in the first place?  Not to listen to more reporting noise, but to gain faster insight?  Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays should not be consumed by combing through reports and metrics to figure out what to act on and what levers to push.  Fridays cannot be counted on as the last day for action, as the opportunity most likely passed them by when they were drowning in that mountain of reports earlier that the week.

Throughout this blog series, we will illuminate the specific ways you can take your week back - one day at a time - with answers in hand and action in progress.  Intrigued already?  Check back next week to understand The Tipping Point - that moment in every week, where no one has the answer and everything stops in an attempt to figure out why.