Retail Insight
RI: Empowering Retailers and Suppliers with Advanced Analytical Solutions

Structured and unstructured data continues to become more readily available and increasingly complex. Businesses continue to look for innovative ways to analyze and leverage this information, but in too many cases the focus is on storage and through put rather than the value of the output. “It’s obvious, but data and insight projects work when they are at the heart of the total strategic agenda,” says Paul Boyle CEO, RI. Headquartered in London, UK and with offices in North America, Singapore and Australia, the company has been creating integrated analytical solutions for the world’s retailers and suppliers for the past decade.

The company focuses on leveraging all types and sizes of data to identify the true drivers of sales and cost for retailers and suppliers. Flexibly hosted to suit the client, easy to implement and automated to scale, the company uses analytics to drive business performance.

With products covering joint business planning, TPx, field sales, on-shelf availability monitoring, event compliance and waste and markdown optimization; all use advanced modeling to generate insight then provide to users in the most appropriate format to direct action. “We help our clients understand where to focus activity to improve sales, and we believe that this information should be transparent to all levels, from head office to store,” says Boyle.

Our vision is to be a place of inspiration for our people and clients where we are capable of solving any problem through advanced analytics

The company’s innovation model has been honed into a well-defined frame work allowing ideas to flow quickly from concept to full enterprise solution.

“Dealing with the size of data that we do, we use many packages to prototype concepts and validate ideas, but our differentiation comes in the multi functional nature of our labs, where SMEs, technologist, and analysts work together,” says Boyle. The firm has its own approach to extracting data and developing real-time analytics, enabled by distributed computing and curated by these carefully blended teams.

RI’s flagship Retail product focuses on addressing the challenge of keeping retailers’ shelves stocked all the time whilst managing waste and inventory. “We use readily available retailer data as the primary input for our algorithms to deliver a globally proven monitor of true lost sales opportunity and use the output to immediately correct issues in-day; driving sales and making preventative changes,” points out Boyle.

The system understands deviations between expected sales, historical sales, and current sales within store clusters for every item, in every hour across every store. “This provides compelling sales and profit improvement across our clients,” adds Boyle, “our most recent major grocery launch validated the system as delivering profit of $33 million within one year.”

Building on a history of success, Boyle's leadership team is currently focused on building and sustaining its unique talent academy from which new ideas will spring. Moving forward, the company plans to open a second office in the U.S. and further expand across Europe and Asia-Pacific. “Our collaborative model has helped us partner with some of the world’s largest organizations to deliver real value and we will continue to work to create smart solutions focused on making insight available to all,” concludes Boyle.