California Apparel News

NEW YORK—Global technology-based business solutions and services firm CSC announced it is expanding its Retail Enterprise Intelligence (CREI) suite with a new partnership with business intelligence and retail analytics firm Infovisionix. The announcement was made at the recent National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Convention and Expo in New York.

The new package will incorporate the Infovisionix suite of retail reporting and analysis tools in order to help retailers better understand how their business is operating and improve key operational and customer performance metrics, including information on how individual products are performing.

“The industry has a wide focus on using data more to understand how businesses are performing,” John Gentry, managing director of consumer products and retail for CSC, said.

The CREI suite uses retail data to pull out transaction information and present it in easy-to-read dashboards and reports that will help the retailer understand where their profit is coming from, what SKUs are performing well, what product colors are selling, and which stores are doing better and why.

“The advantage is you can really drill down into the data,” Gentry explained. The dashboard provides graphs, charts and tables that can inform a retailer on anything form how a particular store is doing now compared with five years ago to how jeanswear or running shoes are selling in a specific city. The benefit is that a retailer can look quickly and see how their business is doing and better perform merchandising and planning.

The system was built to accommodate mid-sized to very large retailers and aims to help them gain new insights and solve the challenge large retailers face when they have bought smaller companies that operate on different data systems or have old reports that don’t work with a new system, Gentry said.

Until now, CSC individually built each system specific to a unique customer, but with the addition of the Infovisionix software, the suite now offers a ready-made set of detailed dashboards and reports, which shortens the time for system setup and interpreting data.

CSC received “a very good response” to the announcement at this year’s NRF convention, and the company had “a very strong show,” with roughly 100 clients coming by on an appointment and drop-in basis, Gentry said. He estimated that he attained 50 active leads from the trade show.

CSC is a global corporation with 97,000 employees and offices in Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa, and North and South America and headquarters in Falls Church, Va. Currently, the new CREI suite is only offered in the United States and Europe.

Infovisionix is an Irvine, Calif.–based company that provides industry-specific business intelligence and data warehousing applications for the retail industry.—Deidre Crawford