Dive Brief:

• Retail cloud service provider SPS Commerce announced the release of an Expanded Insights analytics capability and enhancements to its SPS Sourcing program, which helps retailers identify suppliers and brands to work with, this week at its SPS Commerce In:fluence 2017 event.

• Crocs, Quicksilver and Callaway Golf are among brands already using Expanded Insights, the newest addition to the company’s Performance Analytics demand planning solution, which automatically combines retail point-of-sale and inventory data with external information such as social conversations and sentiment, promotional activity and economic trends across all channels for increased retail business intelligence.

• The SPS Commerce Sourcing enhancement turns the supplier sourcing platform into an end-to-end, source-to-fulfill solution that also benefits suppliers by quickly putting their products in front of more retailers to drive additional business opportunities. 

Dive Insight:

Having cross-channel visibility is incredibly important today as brands and retailers seek a fuller understanding of demand and performance in each channel. They can no longer rely on legacy solutions that lean on in-store point-of-sale data, which gives neither the retailer or the product brand much accurate detail to act on.

Expanded Insights brings the data from across channels, but it also makes it readable and shareable by people working in different departments of an organization by putting it all in a dashboard interface. It also keeps data as up to date as possible by using a data-scrubbing capability that cleanses incorrect, incomplete and duplicate data and standardizes improperly formatted data across all data sources. It also provides the ability to blend that data, including planning/forecast data, increasingly important social engagement details, marketing data, competitive pricing data and other stats with retail point-of-sale data from the 70,000-member SPS retail network. That means brands can gain a unified online and in-store view of performance.

"Having disparate data sources merged into one location assists us in helping our retailers keep pace with consumer demands, industry trends and the competition," Ted Li, senior vice president of Americas at Quiksilver, said in a statement.

Not to be overlooked, the sourcing solution enhancements are also are significant in a rapidly changing retail environment, in which we see department stores like Macy's and J.C. Penney, for example, having to revamp product selection and align with new brand partners to create entirely new revenue channels for themselves. All of this needs to be done rather quickly, so if SPS can expand its sourcing functions to help retailers find suppliers they can trust, SPS itself can prove to be a valuable retail partner.