Blend and Batch: A Macro View of Developing Trade Areas
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Alteryx
Tech Stack
- MapInfo
- MS Access
- Adobe Report
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Predictive Replenishment
Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Blend and Batch is a retail company that operates over 1,300 stores. The company's site location research team is responsible for enabling geospatial support for new store forecasts, making real estate portfolio and capital allocation decisions, and providing geographic queries to help all areas of the organization. The company needed a system that could provide store-level reports showing geographic sales trends, competitive impacts, and demographic summaries. They also needed the ability to predict new stores and remodels, an accurate baseline, block group-level sales, market share, and percent of store sales. The company wanted to understand local dynamics rather than regional ones and group stores to provide trends to measure performance.
The Challenge
Blend and Batch, a retail company, was facing challenges in generating store-level reports showing geographic sales trends, competitive impacts, and demographic summaries. They needed an accurate baseline for predicting new stores and remodels, which required block group-level sales, market share, and percent of store sales. They also needed to combine data sources to delineate a trade area and group stores to provide trends to measure performance. The company was using a combination of T-Log data from front end point-of-sale, MapInfo for geocoding, and MS Access for data calculations. However, this process was time-consuming and required manual steps.
The Solution
The company decided to use Alteryx, a data management platform, to improve their process. Alteryx allowed them to remove multiple programs and incorporate one platform, reducing software costs and eliminating the need for a third-party engineer who developed and maintained the MS Access database. The platform also significantly reduced the time required for POS data processing. However, the company faced some challenges in the early days of using Alteryx due to their early experience level, which caused slower development and more workflows. To improve, they used the Directory, Dynamic Input, and Control Parameter tools in Alteryx. These tools allowed them to collect individual store files in one click, import many files at once, and run the workflow for a select group of stores.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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