Steps to Building a Loyal and Profitable Customer Base

One midsize retailer with a strong online presence recently found that just the first step in their planning process was taking 30 hours to 50 hours per month to run. This process required rolling up hundreds of millions of line-item purchases by stores, product categories, planograms and customer segments. Because the job was so intensive, it had to be scheduled around other processes, which meant that it could take a long time to complete. Migrating this process to a Hadoop cluster reduced total run time to four hours. Now the planning group has far more time to spend on subsequent steps in merchandising planning, making the retailer more nimble in its merchandising.