Data quality is key to serving ‘the next generation’ customer in a tough retail market, according to leading retailers speaking at GS1 UK’s recent Annual Conference.
Data quality is key to serving ‘the next generation’ customer in a tough retail market, according to leading retailers speaking at GS1 UK’s recent Annual Conference.
GS1 UK’s conference this year took place with the backdrop of a tough economic situation and a general election looming. But the overriding theme from all the retail speakers at the packed conference was the importance of data quality in dealing with an ever-changing market.
With the recent Data Crunch report highlighting a £1-billion savings opportunity for the sector through improved data practices and a 400% increase in the amount of data needed to be stored in the next five years, it is no wonder that many in the sector have pushed this issue up the agenda.
Information becomes king
IGD’s chief economist opened the conference’s keynote session with an overview of the current and future state of the economy, the dwindling future supply of water and energy, changing shopper behaviour, globalisation and the need to address food wastage. James Walton claimed that the common thread of all these issues was information. Using information intelligently and better data handling, he said, can help businesses formulate a response to these challenges. Organisations such as GS1 provide some of the necessary tools to support improved data flows, faster decision making and supply chain optimisation that can help protect businesses.
Sainsbury’s IT director, Stephen Paterson, presented on the challenges that retailers have with addressing changing customer habits, cross-channel retailing – interchanging between in-store, online, smart phones and serving the ‘next generation’ customer looking for more product information. Retailers have become very adept at working around data quality problems and need to recognise the impact of inconsistent data on business. Stephen stressed that the sector as a whole, whether retailer or supplier, collectively owned the challenge of ensuring data quality and needed to work collaboratively with GS1 to achieve it. The synchronisation of trusted data between trading partners is vital for the sector and Global Data Synchronisation (GDS) provides a mechanism for this.
A strong theme from the conference was that demand for more data was increasing rapidly.
Technology driving faster retailing
Tesco.com’s IT director, Richard Copperthwaite focused on the pace of change and how it was growing fast in a landscape of new technology, smartphones, social networking sites, changing customer behaviour and multichannel retailing. At Tesco, customer value is core to the business. To be able to serve customers better, data quality improvements in the retail sector is vital and all supply chain participants need to work together with GS1 to achieve this, he claimed.
Speakers from Amazon, Cranfield School of Management, Brakes and World Duty Free also gave an insight into how their businesses were addressing the challenges of the current economic climate through improving their supply chain efficiency.
The GS1 UK conference attracted about 300 delegates and 18 exhibitors mainly from the retail, healthcare and do-it-yourself (DIY) sectors. During the event, GS1 UK presented the first Excellence Awards in association with Cranfield School of Management to Concepta Lowry of leading pub operator, Mitchells & Butlers and Moorfields Eye Hospital for their leadership and drive to promote GS1 standards within their sectors.
