SAS a Leader for retail planning per independent research firm

Confronted with the demands of always connected consumers, it’s vitally important for retailers to keep their merchandising operations agile. Foundational planning areas like assortment optimization, category management and demand planning must run like clockwork to engage with today’s consumers in a meaningful way. The Forrester Wave™: Retail Planning, Q3 2017 report points to SAS as a Leader in the retail planning arena. 

According to Forrester, SAS excels in omnichannel analytics. “In our evaluation, SAS proved its ability to tackle hard optimization issues by demonstrating best-in-class size and pack optimization, execution roadmap, global vision innovation roadmap, partner ecosystem, and supporting products and services. It also demonstrated a low implementation-to-license cost ratio . . . SAS appeals to brands and retailers that might be classed as cautious innovators. They need the security of a large vendor with a massive ecosystem of implementers, and they need help proving the viability of quantitative integrated planning to themselves, but they also need rich functionality that they can extend using a proven platform.” 

In addition to excelling in omnichannel analytics, the analyst firm cited SAS’ experience in customer behavior analytics, as well as an impressive delivery model and partner ecosystem.   

“Easy to use, connected, unified retail planning is the cornerstone of success for retailers today,” said Dan Mitchell, Business Director for SAS’ Retail Practice. “Retail omnichannel analytics from SAS gives retailers the power to orchestrate merchandise plans linked together with marketing, supply chain and all other facets of the consumer experience regardless of channel. By using SAS^® Analytics, retailers now can understand trade area demand for all shopping channels and use that data to localize assortments by neighborhood.” 

Learn more about retail omnichannel analytics from SAS and SAS predictive analytics.