If you are not using it now, Data Science is in your future. Embrace it, it will help your chain in ways you never knew.
Retail has always been a great testing ground for new technologies. The industry has experimented, sometimes painfully, with concepts that were intended to revolutionize the way we sold things.
The OCR-a ticketing standard for capturing sales information finally led to the UPC code and now to the RFID ticket. Traffic counters that used to count objects going on and out the store, now identify unique shoppers by phone pings or facial lD.
In our opinion, the most exciting advances have come in data capture and analysis developments. Visualization tools (eg: Tableau) are light years from the 132 character reports we once lived by. And now, sophisticated mathematical algorithms, combined with big data storage methodologies, have opened the door to new insights. Predictive modeling and machine learning allow us to predict and act on data more effectively than ever before. These technologies although not currently mainstream are available for most.
