Back on East Coast time and away from the allure of Vegas’ nightlife, it’s time for a bit of Retail therapy. No … I am not breaking out the credit card for online shopping (yet), but rather a review of my copious notes taken from more than 15 Retail sessions that took place at SAS Global Forum Executive and User Conference last week at Caesar’s Palace.

Ranging in topics from high performance markdown optimization, localized assortments, clustering, space planning, demand forecasting and merchandise planning, retail analytics was a prominent theme across the board.

One session that particularly stood out was a grocery panel discussion moderated by Deloitte Consulting. “Driving Performance through Retail Analytics,” this lively discussion had international appeal with representatives from Family Dollar, Winn Dixie and SOK, a Finnish retailing cooperative organization that operates in many markets including groceries, consumer durables and service stations. One of the most visible demonstrations of the power of applied retail analytics was the way in which each of these companies shared their experiences about the value of customer analytics. SOK discussed how they embrace a corporate strategy for value chain optimization and Family Dollar talked a bit about how applying analytics has helped identify geographic markets with the most potential.

Additionally, the audience heard valuable input from Winn Dixie about how they anticipate analytics enhancing customers' shopping experience with the implementation of technology and resources to provide improvements in pricing, space planning and assortment optimization.

Overall, helping retailers and grocers to predict buying behavior and to identify customers who are at risk of rolling their shopping cart to the competition is something from which everyone gained valuable insight.

Of course, no discussion on markets and consumers would be complete without touching on the emerging prominence of social media. While several companies are already seeing the potential of applying analytics in both the interpretation and effective utilization of social media, more are just beginning to scratch the surface on the topic.

We hope this will be a continued conversation at the next live event taking place in Orlando at the Premiere Business Leadership series in October…thankfully for me, East Coast time prevails and the allure of Mickey Mouse will provide a different flavor!