In today's fiercely competitive retail business, retailers need performance management tools that will guide them through the pitfalls of industry consolidations, increasing profit targets, and shrinking margins. In modern retail, a performance management system can cut through the complex issues that threaten success: international sourcing, pressures on pricing, multi-channel operations, reduced predictability in the market, the power of the Internet, and complicated overseas markets. To focus on developing strategies that allow them to drive profitable growth, proactive retailers are depending on performance management systems based on planning, reporting, and business intelligence (BI) software. For this software, successful retailers turn to IBM, the world's leading provider of BI solutions.
Cognos Drives Performance Management for Retailers
Retailers worldwide choose IBM for performance management solutions. With the technological leadership, as well as the innovation, vision, and ability to deliver, IBM is helping over 325 retail chains globally to obtain flexible BI deployments. IBM clearly has the expertise in performance management to foster revenue growth, expense management, and operational streamlining: the top 100 Cognos enterprise customers consistently out-perform market indexes.
Cognos Performance Management Systems Improve the Bottom Line
Especially vital in retail operations, performance management is the process of measuring and managing performance throughout the business cycle, refined by IBM into an integrated system that includes well-structured data management, enterprise planning, and relevant, accurate reporting and analysis. The basis of the IBM performance management system is a well-defined data structure that simplifies the information overload typical of today's business environment. The next level of performance management is the planning tools that allow retailers to set realistic but ambitious financial, merchandise, marketing, and store-level objectives. With goals defined to establish a baseline, performance measurement is achieved through the IBM analysis engine. The results of the analysis, displayed for retailers in role-based dashboards and scorecards, show actual key performance indicators—in sales, labor, inventory figures—against planned values, as well as key performance metrics and benchmarks. With these actionable analytics, a retailer can quickly and easily identify the trends in his business, the issues and their causes, and the consumer demands, enabling him to increase sales and improve the bottom line before his competitors.
Learn more about IBM solutions for performance management in retail here.
