Half of retail CXOs have data trust issues

Survey of Retail C-Suite reveals retailers do not have a single source of truth for data or the workforce to derive insights

Despite growing investment in AI and edge technologies retailers are struggling with core digital transformation challenges such as data visibility and provenance, according to a survey of retail CXOs released today.

JDA and Microsoft surveyed 221 C-level executives around the world to investigate the supply chain challenges and technology priorities of retail CXOs.

The research reveals retailers lack visibility into their inventories, which are a vital data source for improving forecasting and driving efficiencies. By entirely digitising its processes, e-Commerce giant Amazon pairs the most efficient warehouse with an order to dramatically reduce delivery times.

Retailers view AI and edge – which can enable real-time inventory visibility and unlock customer data value –  as key drivers of digital transformation, but despite significant investment in the technologies more than three quarters lack a real-time view of inventory across their various business locations, and over half lack a cross-channel view at all.

Those which have successfully established data streams are failing to capitalise on it by integrating proper data provenance processes and training. 46 percent of C-Suite retailers say their data is of poor quality and untrustworthy, and a similar number do not have an analytics strategy in place or the necessary skills to leverage data for decision making.

“Even as retailers try to get to consumer parity, the C-Suite is impeded with core challenges. Digital transformation maturity and keeping up with the next evolution of retail, the intelligent enterprise, will require successfully shedding old habits and eschewing channel-centric thinking for a more holistic view of retail,” said Gaurav Pant, chief insights officer at Incisiv.

Unsurprisingly, the research also found that cloud-based solutions are now an integral part of retail IT architecture. But despite executives’ belief that – along with AI – cloud has more than twice the impact on business agility compared to other technologies, supply chain and store systems lag in cloud adoption.