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Blog: Krish Krishnan

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Another new for Microsoft - CRM at Grocery Supermarket

In the near future, you will be grocery shopping at the local supermarket and your smart-cart (not to be confused with the smartcarte at the airports) will keep displaying coupons for the items on sale for that week in the aisle you are currently shopping. We are not talking about a Tom Cruise or a Spielberg movie here, this is in the news (on national TV) and the company working on integrating RFID to your grocery cart and provide real-time CRM is Microsoft.

Even if this is in the works and is a couple of years away, with windows mobile and RFID and a database (maybe SQL Server 2010 or something like that), the cost of development and implementation notwithstanding, it will open a new channel for DataWarehousing.

We are talking about Retail Data warehousing at your grocery store, doing real time market basket analysis, developing an Amazon like clickstream display showing based on sale items, what other items customers have bought in the store. Plus it will give the store operations and labor management real time data to analyze and improve operations and staffing and predict better product movement. Combine things like weather and seasonal data, you can do trend analysis and predict sales. A chain like Safeway stores can now think of store, district, regional and national analytical engines for product sales that will work close to real time.

Whew, real time CRM, Data Warehousing, MDM, Analytics all these get a whole new lifecycle to look forward too in a new vertical whenever this happens in the future.

  Posted by kkrishnan on January 16, 2008 10:27 PM |

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