I saw this week that Teradata has launched a new Retail Advanced Business Analytics & RFID Lab. The lab is designed to help Consumer Branded Goods and Retail companies analyze data captured by radio frequency identification (RFID) applications across the supply chain and show how their data can be used in innovative ways to derive incremental business value. Focal points at the lab include deep analytics, predictive modeling, data mining, and RFID data analysis. Analytical results are presented using data visualization technologies.
"The lab is dedicated exclusively to addressing the everyday business management issues faced by retailers. Our customers recognize that the ability to find connections between detailed-level data gives them a competitive advantage," said Bill Franks, Teradata director of retail analytics.
All this sounds great but RFID can, if folks are not careful, suffer from the "so what" problem. I can capture huge amounts of data and analyze it to my heart's content but unless I decide to act differently as a result it is useless. Hence "I have all this great RFID data. So what?".
Some of the decisions that might be impacted are strategic in nature and so analysis and visualization are key. This means helping the folks who, for instance, decide on new store locations effectively see the picture created by all the data.
Other decisions, however, are operational and the data collected will not help unless it can be acted on by operational systems or by staff not trained (or event trainable) in analytic techniques. For example a shipment's data stream shows it is running late. Having the tracking system inform the destination of this fact is a simple kind of operational action (typical of a business activity monitoring approach). A more useful operational decision would be to decide how to respond to this fact automatically. This might involve figuring out if any alternative shipments can be sent by a different route to arrive earlier and, if so, ship any such shipment with instructions to make sure it does not go by the same route as the delayed shipment. Meanwhile the system should re-direct the delayed one to a less urgent destination by changing the instructions delivered to the staff who next handle the shipment (perhaps at a trans-shipment point). Al requires an ability to make a business decision, influenced by analytic models of probability and by rules from contracts and shipping companies, in real-time.
This kind of operational decision-making offers great potential for the use of RFID data. Don't let a focus on visualization or back-room analysis blind you to the value of automating and improving operational decisions.
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RFID is taught as the ultimate Supply Chain solution that will drive millions if not billions of savings throughout the supply chain and other areas. The question in the air is: Does RFID really have this “healing” power? From the ordinary process, such as moving goods through loading docks, to the complex, such as managing huge amount of data as information about goods is collected in real time makes RFID an ultimate supply chain solution.