Beyond the Askuity acquisition to the future of retail analytics

Date Posted: February 11, 2019

Askuity customers might be feeling a little adrift right now. Support for Askuity is ending unless you only want data from Home Depot, and that means you need to make some tough decisions about what your retail analytics solution will be going forward.

The insights provided by the best retail analytics companies go beyond simple reporting to deliver true predictive power. They help you proactively identify and address top challenges like out-of-stock and overstock situations. Running your business without them would be like using a paper map instead of taking advantage of GPS technology with real-time traffic updates.

For Askuity customers, the Home Depot acquisition and lack of support the company is providing could be a real problem – but it is also a significant opportunity to evaluate newer vendors, like Alloy, who can do a better job of meeting your holistic needs.

Here are some key advantages Alloy has over other retail analytics providers that make us the right partner moving forward.

Focus

Alloy’s focus has been and always will be on serving consumer goods brands. Unlike Askuity or other companies that try to serve both retailers and brands, we were founded because of the challenges we heard from manufacturers about using available point-of-sale and channel data. Our goal is to help these vendors take control and flip the current information asymmetry, where retailers hold the data and make it difficult for brands to gain insight into their own consumers.

 

Intelligent demand forecasting

Askuity, like many business intelligence tools, was only backward-looking, which means it only provided analytics for your prior performance. Alloy offers these descriptive analytics too, but we also deliver forward-looking forecasts and recommendations. We deliver predictive analytics to help you understand what is likely to happen and plan accordingly.

With Alloy, your team can scale forecasting to every SKU, at every location and e-commerce channel, and keep forecasts updated with the latest demand data. Proactive alerts automatically notify the right people of issues like predicted out-of-stocks or deviations from plans, so you can act on opportunities before they disappear.

Flexible and dynamic dashboards

One of the key places you’ll notice a difference is in the way Alloy puts the data into your hands. Forget canned reports or contacting the vendor each time you want to look at your data slightly differently.

Alloy software is more flexible. We go beyond pre-built reports and dashboards to offer a completely dynamic platform. You can zoom in and out of the data in seconds, analyzing performance by retailer, region, store, SKU or a variety of other attributes. Our intuitive design also makes it easy for anyone to gain insights from the data, from front-line sales to supply chain analysts.

 

Single source of truth

Retail analytics software solutions tend to focus on enabling the sales team, while Alloy also acts as a single trusted data source across your organization. We help sales teams sell more, and at the same time can marketing and supply chain with actionable insights for ROI analysis of local in-store marketing spend, optimization of replenishment models, demand planning and more.

As a result, Alloy breaking down functional silos and unites teams through a shared view of data.

Transitioning to Alloy

Even before the Askuity acquisition was announced, companies like Essick Air were switching to Alloy. Our retail analytics and demand planning solutions simply do more.

We even make it easy to move to Alloy and maintain continuity. Our platform can help extract all of your data from Askuity, so you don’t lose any of that valuable history. We work to minimize disruption to your existing processes and can be up and running in a matter of days.

Let us help your company move beyond Askuity and on to something better.

Related resources


Customer Stories

A leading fitness equipment maker hits its stride with Alloy

The speed and flexibility of Alloy POS analytics enabled this consumer brand to make more timely decisions for new product success and inventory management.

View
Article

Talking better product launch and allocation decisions with Ferrero USA

The global confectioner mitigates waste, improves service levels and controls costs by connecting digital supply chain visibility with POS analytics.

Keep reading
Article

Say goodbye to constant supply chain firefighting: A guide

How to take an iterative approach to digital supply chain transformation with real-time alerts that motivate teams to collaborate on issue resolution

Keep reading