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 optimisation, 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 optimisation issues by demonstrating best-in-class size and pack optimisation, 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 behaviour analytics, as well as an impressive delivery model and partner ecosystem.

“In this connected age, it is more important than ever for retailers to ensure their planning system is connected, unified and easy to use” said Mike Blanchard, Director of Customer Intelligence Solutions at SAS, North EMEA. “Retail omnichannel analytics from SAS enables retailers to make decisions to satisfy customers who now have the power to shop at any time and on any channel. Through the use of SAS^® Analytics, these businesses can optimise their service by simplifying how they process this data, which results in them increasing profit margins, improving key performance indicators and boosting stock service levels”.