Retail Data Playbook — Part 1

Retail is a great and fun industry to be in. Things move quick, decisions are made quick, and with a great data architecture in place, you can influence decision making. I have been in this industry for the past 6 years and I want to share my experiences here so that one can apply them if they are working in this industry.

As with any successful IT project, we would want to understand what are we trying to do? What questions do our business and C-Suite want answers to?

The first model that I am going to start with is Demand.

Demand

These are all the orders that the company receives. The grain is the order line level.

We need to be able to answer:

• When was the order placed?
• Where was the order placed?
• What is the order amount?
• What product did we sell?
• What discounts did we apply?
• Is the order line a gift card?
• How much product did we sell?
• What was the cost for the product that we did sell?
• Where is the order shipping from?
• Where is the order being delivered to?
• What customer is associated with the order?
• What were the demand sales for a given fiscal week?
• What are the demand sales for WTD, MTD, QTD, STD and YTD?