A modern data infrastructure is essential for retailers looking to stay competitive today. Companies are abandoning more traditional, on-premises IT infrastructures and moving to more centralized “as a service” (XaaS) models of delivery enabled by cloud technologies, according to McKinsey. Aging on-premises infrastructures are unable to meet demands for agility and innovation, eating up too much time and too many resources for teams trying to maintain them.
Cloud-based infrastructures let you store and share unlimited amounts of data at a low cost, unrestricted by data silos or formats. They also enable users to run analytics or machine learning models using a variety of tools, and can process greater volumes of data in shorter amounts of time. These capabilities enable the kind of real-time, data-driven decision-making that’s essential for business today.
Snowflake’s Retail Data Cloud provides a modern data infrastructure that lets retailers streamline typically inefficient core functions, such as inventory management, while gaining real-time visibility into business performance and improving forecasting. The Data Cloud delivers granular and timely insights to predict demand and optimize inventory, supply chains, and fulfillment. Retailers can also share data without copying or moving it, increasing the ability to maintain privacy and security controls.
Here’s how a few of our retail customers are using Snowflake’s modern data infrastructure to optimize operations and reporting:
US Foods
Snowflake’s Data Cloud scaled to become US Foods’ single analytics repository for transaction data. Snowflake helps US Foods build forecasts and reduce the customer churn rate. Before removing products from its catalog, US Foods analyzes millions of historical records to estimate revenue impact, identify customers who are likely to leave, and develop individualized retention efforts. The switch to Snowflake modernizes operations and reports for US Foods, delivering instant, actionable insights with less hands-on manipulation and human error.
Good Eggs
Good Eggs is an online grocery delivery service that’s pioneering a new way for people to feed their families. The San Francisco Bay Area company delivers fresh local produce, meal kits, grocery staples, household products, and wine to customers’ homes. Good Eggs can query business data stored in Snowflake to help its data analysts and data scientists analyze, visualize, and share data with internal organizations. For example, Warehouse Operations tracks the status of delivery routes. The business team reviews reports on average order value and gross margin. Other reports use predictive models to forecast business trends. Data loaded into Snowflake enables Good Eggs to use its proprietary warehouse management software (WMS) to monitor and optimize warehouse operations.
Patch
Patch sources the best plants and gardening products from the best suppliers, then delivers the plants to the customer’s home or office. Patch makes 95% of its decisions based on quantitative data from several sources. Originally, all the data had to be brought in, cleaned, connected, and distributed to diverse end users and applications. The company needed a scalable and reliable solution that could handle multiple inputs and outputs. It also needed a good attribution model to ensure it optimized spend on Google and Facebook. In addition, Patch needed to gather up-to-date and accurate order data, such as cost of goods, before attributing the data to individual orders. The company migrated to Snowflake to solve its data issues, as Snowflake’s unique architecture separates storage and compute, enabling scalability and per-minute cost allocation to individual processes. Snowflake also provides reliability and near-zero maintenance. Now with Snowflake, maintenance time has been almost eliminated, freeing the Patch IT team to focus on BI and analytics.
Discover how your organization can modernize operations and reporting with Snowflake:
- Learn more about the Snowflake Retail Data Cloud.
- Read our Retail Success Guide: 10 Ways Retail and CPG Drive Business Value with the Data Cloud.
- Learn about the Modern Marketing Data Stack in our webinar, The Future of Marketing Is on Snowflake.
- Read about Snowflake’s unique, multi-cluster shared data architecture.