OCTOBER 20218 By Michael Coatsworth, Domain Architect, Core, and Mazen Kassis, Head of Data & Analytics, Foodstuffs North Island LimitedFirstly, a little context. Foodstuffs North Island operates supermarkets, liquor, and wholesale stores and has an award-winning suite of private label brands. New Zealand owned and operated, Foodstuffs North Island is a co-operative and one of New Zealand's longest-standing businesses. But at our heart, we are grocers, with an unerring passion for delivering for New Zealanders.Like most industries, grocery retail is fundamentally about matching supply with demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. This has been the cornerstone of Foodstuffs North Island's business ethos for almost 100 years; aligning what we do and sell with what our customers want.Also like many industries, we have increasingly sought to enhance customer experience and satisfaction through the meaningful use of data. Our SAP implementation has given us an all-important real-time view of demand and sales data, so rather than retrospectively address performance issues, we can now use data to predict and cater for future customer behaviour. In essence, putting us on the front foot, not the back foot.A great example of this is in how we manage product affinity and store layout. Whereas conventional logic would encourage us to range different sizes of the same product together for labour efficiency, data analysis often reveals that we can increase customer convenience (and sales) by placing products of different sizes next to other products that they are typically purchased with and potentially even within different departments of the store. But just having the data at our fingertips is only part of the story. While data can indicate which items sell more on a sunny or rainy day, or which flavours of a particular product are the most popular, so will an experienced grocer. And that's because retail grocery is both art and science. Many of our store owners can lean on considerable experience and are already confident making decisions based on well-honed instincts. The role of data analytics in our business is therefore not to replace human experience and knowledge, rather it is to augment it through validating or enhancing decision-making ­ all with the end goal of creating a better outcome and experience for our customers.As such, the data is both everything and nothing. Everything, in that it provides a real-time view of performance and pain points; but this counts for nothing if the company using it doesn't have the organisational maturity or culture to trust in it. In this regard, 2020 was quite the benchmark year for us: Firstly, as we embraced the responsibility and privilege of providing essential service to the nation during multiple lockdowns; and then as we delivered our most successful customer loyalty marketing campaign ever for our New World brand, our SMEG knives promotion.Using data in our COVID responseJust over 12 months ago now we, like businesses around the world, pivoted from front to back foot by the immediate impact of the pandemic. As we all were adapting to social distancing requirements and significantly increased demand HOW BIG DATA ANALYTICS GUIDED OUR DECISION-MAKING THROUGH A YEAR LIKE NO OTHERMichael CoatsworthIN MY VIEW
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