With constant fluctuations in global supply and demand, retail operations leaders need granular and timely insights to predict demand and optimize their inventory. However, with product sales information spread across silos and channel partner systems, operations leads are stuck using stale data and end up with excess out-of-stocks and inefficiencies across warehouse and store inventory. Retailers need a way to measure and respond to shifts in consumer demand by gathering real-time insights from every corner of their supply network.
Snowflake’s Data Cloud enables you to access SKU-level inventory and sales data in near real-time. You can enrich this data with regional insights about consumer demographics and other factors that may influence demand. As a result, you can make smarter inventory allocation decisions and drive fulfillment innovation, such as operationalizing click-and-collect or reducing delivery windows from weeks to days—or even the same day.
With Snowflake Marketplace, you can also conduct robust inventory forecasting, which requires integrating second- and third-party data from channel partners and other systems. You can also ingest critical real-time information such as weather, social media sentiments, inflation, and labor workforce trends to better understand macro cross-industry trends. This is essential in predicting supply chain disruption and improving efficiency.
Here’s how a few of our retail customers are using Snowflake to drive efficiency across the supply chain and better collaborate with their channel partners.
Instacart
Instacart partnered with Snowflake through the Powered by Snowflake program to build an application that enables its retail partners to see more comprehensive, timely purchasing trends and insights on the Instacart marketplace. With tens of thousands of unique SKUs at every grocery store—and inventory and other attributes changing minute by minute—reporting real-time trends allows Instacart to drive even more value for its retail partners. The Powered by Snowflake program’s workshops focused on design optimization and access controls enabled Instacart to significantly accelerate the development timeline for Instacart’s new retailer insights tools. Being able to more seamlessly process product and availability data, and share that data back with retail partners in real time, enables Instacart to help retailers gain an even clearer picture of what’s happening on their store shelves, and ultimately drive more growth for their businesses.
Rakuten Rewards
Rakuten Rewards provides cash back and shopping rewards. The company needed a solution that could scale with its growth. After evaluating many vendors, it selected Snowflake as the foundation for its enterprise data hub. With Snowflake’s separation of storage and compute, Rakuten Rewards can set up individual teams or even individual users with their own specialized warehouses for their specific workloads. The data engineering team at Rakuten Rewards isolated the workload from different business units, and even different parts of the ETL processes, into different warehouses—meaning they don’t impact the performance of each other. Snowflake’s cloud-based warehouse provides both stability and visibility. Rakuten Rewards works with 3,000+ merchants, all of whom stand to benefit from getting more insights into how the program is working for them. Rakuten Rewards can now deliver that data in a quick and efficient way.
Kraft Heinz
Since moving to the Snowflake Data Cloud, Kraft Heinz has been able to easily access external data sets that are hosted on Snowflake’s platform. For example, Kraft Heinz has been using COVID-19 data from Johns Hopkins University, allowing it to see instantly which areas of its business are most impacted. It uses this data to build predictive models that allow it to get products into the supply chain exactly where (and when) they’re needed, ensuring its partners and customers can keep supermarket shelves stocked. New data sets must typically go through extensive preparation and testing before they are ready to use, which impedes agility and experimentation. With Snowflake Data Marketplace, third-party data sets are already available on the platform and can be turned on in just a few minutes. They are then available for use alongside Kraft Heinz’s own CRM, inventory, and other data, making it easy for data teams to experiment and build new applications. That means the company can focus its resources on innovation instead of the mechanics of data plumbing.
Discover how your organization can use Snowflake to drive supply chain efficiency and improve collaboration with channel partners:
Originally posted on March 7, 2023 @ 2:54 am