In 2022, retailers are still dealing with the lasting impacts of the global pandemic, including a decreased workforce, supply chain disruptions, and surging inflation. At the same time, now is the chance for a “long overdue great retail reset” that could promote stability and profitability, according to a recent Deloitte report. This includes restructuring outmoded supply chains, rightsizing inventory management, reviewing pricing, recalibrating promotional cadences, and reinventing the physical store for the digital age.
Data is at the core of these changes. Snowflake’s Retail Data Cloud helps organizations become data-driven so they can use this transitional period as an opportunity to drive profits, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and optimize operations.
Here are five capabilities of the Retail Data Cloud that empower retailers, manufacturers, distributors, consumer packaged goods (CPG) vendors, and industry technology providers to better serve customers in a challenging environment:
- Data integration: Organizations can integrate all of their data regardless of source, speed, or format, and operate from a single source of truth. A leading grocery chain is leveraging the Retail Data Cloud to gather data from more than 2,000 store locations into a single, unified view that will improve the customer experience.
- Data governance: Retailers can ensure strict data governance and help meet regulatory compliance requirements with a suite of easily managed security capabilities including data clean room functionality, auditability features like double-blind joins, restricted queries, centralized RBAC, and row-/columnar-level obfuscation that enable data to be shared without movement and risk of revealing PII.
- Scalability: Retailers can better optimize operations with elastic performance, scaling up to meet the analytics needs during seasonal peaks and scaling down to improve efficiencies and profitability. This capability has become especially important as ongoing regional and global disruptions are changing business-as-usual schedules. A major electronic commerce and online retailer uses Snowflake to scale business operations and to provide secure, near real-time data access to vendor and merchandising partners.
- Data sharing: Organizations can share data across their ecosystem in near real-time across all three public cloud platforms. A leading online grocery platform partnered with Snowflake through the Powered by Snowflake program to build an application for its retail partners to enable them to see more comprehensive, timely purchasing trends and insights on tens of thousands of unique SKUs across 55,000 store locations.
- Pre-built partner solutions: Organizations can leverage industry-specific, pre-built solutions created by Snowflake’s network of partners, from standard data models to AI/ML-powered insights, to reduce time to value and increase the impact of their investments. Some current applications allow retailers and CPGs to share relevant data and collaborate on key use cases, from improving customer experiences to optimizing supply chain operations.
For more information on how Snowflake’s Retail Data Cloud can help your organization drive business value, visit Snowflake for Retail & CPG.