ClearStory Speeds CPG, Retail and Brand Analytics to Boost

MENLO PARK, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 9, 2016) - ClearStory Data , the company bringing business-oriented Analytics and Data Intelligence to everyone through fast-cycle, disparate data analysis, today announced faster, more meaningful brand analytics insights for consumer packaged goods (CPG) and retail organizations via its automated, Intelligent Data Harmonization™ capabilities and Interactive, Collaborative StoryBoards™. With ClearStory, organizations can analyze disparate and complex data more quickly without losing critical information in the process while reducing costly data wrangling time. The resulting insights lead to increased revenue, competitive advantage and improved customer service, retention and added value.

ClearStory's modern BI solution more quickly reveals valuable information hidden in premium syndicated data sources such as Nielsen, IRI, along with point-of-sale (POS) systems and other enterprise systems like SAP. Blending these data sources without traditional heavy data modeling or manual wrangling of spreadsheets is critical to gain deeper, more meaningful insights rapidly so organizations can easily see brand and category performance across market segments, demographics and sales channels to maximize trade promotions and campaign effectiveness, and to optimize last-mile supply chain and distribution logistics.

The combination of ClearStory's automated data blending, Intelligent Data Harmonization and near-real-time insights in its Collaborative, Interactive StoryBoards™ enables organizations to acquire the transformative insights needed to drive customer acquisition, increase loyalty, elevate brand relevance and boost revenue growth while eliminating the costly effort required to manually prep and blend fragmented data silos. With an expanded, holistic view of global supply chains and detailed brand analytics, companies can optimize offerings with fresh customer data.

While many CPG and retail companies use analytics, "most struggle to execute an analytics strategy that results in effective and efficient decisions and clear action because they are immersed in compiling data and conducting fragmented analysis," according to a report from Accenture. In addition, Aberdeen Research estimates that "fifty-three percent of large retailers indicate that customer analysis is difficult due to enormity of data from different channels."

Accenture quantified the benefits and ROI of large CPG companies using advanced demand side analytics in its report. For example, Unilever saw a 40 percent improvement in seven-day forecasts, and Del Monte reduced inventory rates by 27 percent in two years, decreasing pallet space requirements in retailer distribution centers by up to 65 percent.

With ClearStory Data, organizations can:

• Speed data prep, automate data harmonization and rapidly combine more disparate data from to accelerate insights delivery: ClearStory intelligently infers data attributes from syndicated data sources such as Nielsen, external POS systems, internal supply chain repositories and flat files to speed and automate data prep and harmonization. Users can now quickly reach insights that were previously unattainable, iterate on them, and add additional data sources on-the-fly without needing lengthy, complex data prep and ETL -- as was the case with traditional analysis and BI solutions.
• Score and recommend relevant data to answer deeper questions: ClearStory's Intelligent Data Harmonization™ automatically scores the relative affinity between distinct datasets and provides guidance to help business users arrive at desired views and insights. Users can discover deeper consumer insights to answer new and more sophisticated questions. The harmonization and scoring lets organizations spot the most relevant data in each source quickly to reach immediate, meaningful answers fast.
• Gain a diagnostic, holistic, "what's happening" view of buyer behaviors in a single Interactive StoryBoard: Effortlessly spot comprehensive insights to determine factors that impact consumer purchase behaviors and sales performance, drive operational efficiencies and revenue-impacting decisions by facilitating collaboration in-context between business stakeholders, retail partners and suppliers. These insights enable organizations to see what's happening with product SKUs at each store location in real time and make data-driven decisions to boost business results and revenue growth.

"Our recent advances to ClearStory's Spark-based Data Inference and Intelligent Data Harmonization capabilities through machine-based discovery and scoring of data sources and their contents helps organizations cut down on costly talent resources who struggle to wrangle data to quickly unlock and share valuable insights," says Ali Tore, Chief Product Officer at ClearStory Data. "Automating deeper consumer and market insights means more time for organizations to work on new product ideas, collaborate with colleagues and partners, or develop and implement new marketing and sales strategies to drive their business."

For more information on ClearStory's capabilities for CPG and retail analytics, or to request a demo, visit: http://www.clearstorydata.com/demo .

About ClearStory Data

ClearStory Data is bringing Data Intelligence to everyone to accelerate the way business leaders get answers from more data, on a faster cycle, across any number of disparate data sources. ClearStory Data's solution simplifies data access to internal and external sources, automates data harmonization via Intelligent Data Harmonization™ across disparate data, enables fast, collaborative exploration, and reduces business wait time for insights via Interactive, Collaborative StoryBoards™. ClearStory Data lets business users be more self-reliant in reaching richer, faster insights. Its end-to-end solution includes an integrated Spark-based data processing platform and an incredibly simple user application model for business consumption of insights. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, DAG Ventures, Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB).