Retail has become so much more complicated in recent years on both the customer order side (buy-online-pickup-instore) and on the supply side (bottlenecks, supply chain interruptions) – that the old ways of measuring success (same store sales, labor ratio-to-revenue) just won’t cut it.

In fact, these “old school metrics” are really scorecards, not real time alerts or calls to action.

What retailers desperately need now, in order to act and react to real-time events as they continue to unfold at a breakneck pace, is a whole new generation of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Our most recent research report – released just last week – seeks to examine how retailers are planning – and investing – for these new tools.

Some key findings of the report include:

• 52% of retailers strongly agree that management is “constantly looking for new ways to measure performance” – but likely more importantly, those tools need to be easily digestible: 98% agree that “the executive team needs performance reports that are ‘short and sweet’”.
• The better a retailer’s sales performance is, the more likely they are to trust in the power of data. 76% of Retail Winners (those whose sales are outperforming the norm) are already using and satisfied with tools that help them make sense of data being extracted from their legacy operational systems.
• When it comes interfaces, executive dashboards already hold the most appeal to retailers. 97% say these are the most valuable tools currently available, and 54% are not only already using such tools, but report that they are very happy with the results so far.
• Retail Winners (those whose sales are outperforming the norm) are also already far more reliant on things like natural language interfaces, exception alerting tools, and role-based mobile access, often-times at an implementation rate of more than 2 to 1 over their average and underperforming peers.

If you haven’t yet read the full report, How Retailers Are Operationalizing Analytics With New KPIs, we encourage you to do so. As always, it’s free to everyone, and like all of RSR’s reports, it also contains a series of BOOTstrap recommendations that all retailers can follow to improve the status of how they implement and use new key performance indicators – and the technologies that help them make sense.

We certainly hope you enjoy it!