Managing data manually is slowing you down. For midsize retailers, repetitive tasks like report creation, pipeline maintenance, and data preparation waste time and resources. Automation can help you eliminate these inefficiencies and focus on smarter decisions.
Key Takeaways:
- Save Time: Automate manual reporting and data prep to focus on analysis.
- Scale Easily: Grow without adding extra workload by unifying data across systems.
- Improve Decisions: Use real-time data for better pricing, inventory, and promotions.
With tools like Retlia, retailers cut costs, improve accuracy, and make faster decisions. Stop wasting time on manual tasks and start using automation to grow effectively.
Massive Time and Cost Savings: Aaron Ambur of Nexus Outdoors
Common Data Management Problems in Retail
Midsize retailers often face challenges with manual data tasks, which slow down operations and hinder progress on key projects. Here are three major hurdles they encounter.
Time-Consuming Report Creation
When data is scattered, building reports becomes a manual, time-intensive process. This creates a reliance on IT teams and delays critical decision-making.
"We’re saving close to $500 per month based on some initial work, and we’ll continue to build that out for greater savings." – Group BI Manager at Takealot
Data quality issues have caused significant revenue losses for over half of surveyed organizations. In fact, the average impact rose from 26% in 2022 to 31% in 2023. On top of that, maintaining data pipelines takes up a lot of IT resources.
Data Pipeline Maintenance
Keeping data pipelines running smoothly often requires manual intervention, which consumes IT’s time. Teams dedicate hours to performing quality checks and ensuring data consistency across systems like POS, CRM, and ERP.
One global electronics retailer cut stockouts by 30% after automating inventory synchronization across their e-commerce platforms. But even with pipelines in place, data preparation remains a major obstacle.
Data Preparation Challenges
Cleaning and merging data eats up valuable time, often leading to mismatched recommendations, delayed fulfillment, and blocked insights.
For example, a fashion retailer combined their online and in-store data, which boosted customer retention by 20% and improved efficiency by 15%.
How Automated Data Management Helps
Automation addresses challenges like manual reporting and pipeline inefficiencies by offering three major advantages.
Streamlined Data Collection
Automation consolidates data from e-commerce platforms, ERP systems, POS tools, and marketing channels into a single, real-time stream. This eliminates delays, reduces manual effort, and ensures teams always have up-to-date, accurate information.
For instance, Nexus Outdoors transitioned from struggling to access basic sales and inventory reports to instantly viewing critical business metrics. With this data readily available, they now make quicker decisions about inventory, promotions, and sales forecasts.
Empowered Data Analysis
Self-service tools allow business users to analyze data without relying on IT teams. Marketing, operations, and finance staff can create custom reports and answer on-the-spot questions independently. This speeds up decision-making and lets IT focus on more complex projects.
At Nexus Outdoors, Aaron Ambur includes “an empty chair” during weekly analytics meetings to symbolize the real-time data displayed on their screens.
How Nexus Empowers Their Brand’s Teams
Ready-to-Use Data
Automated systems handle data preparation tasks like cleaning, enriching, and organizing. By applying consistent rules and validations, these platforms reduce human error, improve accuracy, and produce datasets that are immediately ready for analysis.
Some benefits include:
- Automated error checks for higher accuracy
- Standardized models for dependable reporting
- Faster data queries, cutting hours of preparation time
Companies adopting automated data management have seen operational costs drop by as much as 65%, thanks to streamlined inventory processes and more efficient employees.
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Advantages for Midsize Retailers
With streamlined data collection and self-service analysis in place, automated management offers three major benefits for midsize retailers.
Save Time on Manual Tasks
Automation eliminates the need for time-consuming report preparation, allowing teams to focus on analyzing performance instead of formatting data. For example, Nexus Outdoors shifted from manual reporting to instant metrics, freeing up IT resources for strategic initiatives.
"The world’s wide open to us right now. Whatever situation comes in front of us, there’s never a day that we hesitate to answer a business question because it’s at our fingertips." – Aaron Ambur, Nexus Outdoors
Scale Without Extra Work
Automation enables growth by scaling operations and supporting omnichannel strategies – without requiring additional staff. Benefits include unified data from e-commerce, ERP, POS, and marketing systems, self-service reporting that doesn’t rely on IT, and automatic updates that eliminate the need for manual checks.
Make Smarter Decisions
Access to real-time data empowers retailers to make better decisions around pricing, inventory, and promotions. Key areas of improvement include:
- Promotional strategies
- Inventory planning
- Sales forecasting
- Product performance analysis
This goes beyond basic reporting – retailers can fine-tune pricing, manage inventory more efficiently, and pinpoint top-performing products based on revenue and profit.
These benefits lead to tangible improvements across both operations and IT.
Results from Using Retlia
Midsize retailers, tired of dealing with manual reports and broken pipelines, see clear benefits with Retlia:
Less Time Spent on Data Prep
With Retlia’s automated workflows, data is cleaned and formatted instantly. This means teams can skip tedious prep work and dive straight into analysis.
Faster Report Creation
Self-service analytics let teams create and access reports on their own, cutting out bottlenecks and delays.
Tangible Business Outcomes
Nexus Outdoors used real-time data to achieve the following:
- Real-time tracking of performance across brands, sales, and inventory
- Improved promotions and forecasts using margin-based, real-time insights
- Better forecasting thanks to instantly accessible data
"The world’s wide open to us right now. Whatever situation comes in front of us, there’s never a day that we hesitate to answer a business question because it’s at our fingertips." – Aaron Ambur, Nexus Outdoors
Conclusion: Growing Without Manual Effort
For midsize retailers, expanding operations no longer has to mean piling extra manual tasks onto IT and operations teams. Automated data management offers a straightforward way to grow without the usual overhead, allowing teams to concentrate on more impactful work.
Fast and dependable insights lead to smarter decisions in areas like inventory, marketing, and sales. Instead of spending time preparing data, operations teams can focus on analysis, IT teams can work on strategic initiatives, and leadership can make decisions based on real-time information.
This shift is especially transformative for midsize retailers that previously lacked access to advanced data tools. With automation in place, these businesses can compete on a larger scale while maintaining lean, focused teams.