BI For LP: How Much Sophistication Can You Handle?
By Matt Pillar, editor in chief
SysRepublic is bringing Euro-savvy BI tools for LP across the pond. Are US retailers ready to move past simple exception reporting in the battle against fraud?
We often write about the need for improved cross-disciplinary data integration in retail. In large retail enterprises, data silos and application disparity are still, unfortunately, alive and well. Through one-off initiatives, acquisitions, and staggered upgrades, many retailers have wound up with silo'ed apps and data, and very few have hammered out reasonable integration paths that enable multidisciplinary sharing of said data. This is especially true in LP, where sophisticated new fraud-thwarting technologies are reliant on the convergence of data from the POS, video surveillance platform, e-commerce and catalog channels, merchandising department, and HR department, to name just a few.
It's a timely emergence then on the part of SysRepublic, a company with a suite of integration and business intelligence products that personify the concept and value of sharing important retail data across departments. Already popular with tier-ones and mega retailers in Europe, SysRepublic is now making a push into the States. At the NRF LP show last month, Chris D'Amore, global sales director for SysRepublic, treated me to a demonstration of his company's Secure LP software. It's an understatement to call Secure an exception reporting platform. The market is polluted with exception reporting software, most of which does little more than allow retailers to see corollary activities between two (or in some cases, more) applications.
Secure is different, and here's why. It's really a business intelligence tool — it features its own data warehouse and the ability to integrate other data sources — any other data sources — enabling users with seemingly unlimited querying power. It features a fully-featured case management tool, and the whole thing is Web based. SysRepublic was (and still is) a BI and integration solutions provider before it was an LP solutions provider.
If I wanted to flag the way specific associates handle transactions involving specific merchandise using specific tenders at specific times of the day, I would only begin to test the querying flexibility of the tool. In fact, D'Amore took me through so many complex ad-hoc investigative scenarios during our half-hour together, the only criticism of the tool I could muster is that it's too sophisticated for the current market. Of course, I know that not to be the case. While it's certainly not for every retailer, SysRepublic boasts HMV, Marks & Spencer, Metro, Sainsbury's, and Tesco, among others, as UK-based clients. There's no way those LP boys across the pond are any smarter than us.