How do you respond when your favored Brand A product is out of stock on the grocery store shelf? If you’re like most, you’ll simply choose Brand B and carry on with your day. The consumer walks away with a satisfactory product, the grocery store walks away with a sale, but Brand A has lost the sale — and perhaps also lost a loyal customer. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers have the most to lose in an out-of-stock situation which occurs nearly 10% of the time.
In order to win the sale, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers must consistently monitor their on-shelf presence to provide a reliable feedback loop to their retail partners. Reducing out-of-stock situations can be the key to maintaining and gaining competitive advantage. This battle is won or lost based on access to timely data. Monitoring real-world store shelf stock levels across thousands of retail locations isn’t the only logistical challenge CPG manufacturers must overcome to stay on top. They also need a specialized data infrastructure to ingest, cleanse, and glean insights from this constantly in-flux dataset.
After more than two decades building the backend data infrastructure for highly-scaled consumer applications, Derek Streeter joined Clear Box Retail to help them solve this challenge for CPG manufacturers. Clear Box Retail has made it their mission to maximize on-shelf-availability and grow sales for CPG manufacturers by providing the most accurate visibility into timely on-the-ground data with their ClearView reporting tool.
On the data ingestion side, this requires supporting a wide variety of data inputs, each with unique data cleansing and transformation needs. On the reporting side, this requires supporting both BI tools and ever-evolving use cases for 1st and 3rd party data analysts to query time-bound data sets. In all scenarios, the ability to modularize reusable role-specific SQL code is critical.
Derek chose Coginiti Premium to tackle these challenges. He especially appreciates Coginiti’s Catalog, which provides a database platform agnostic way to store, manage, and execute dynamic, nestable, versioned SQL code. Coginiti has taken best practices from software development and made them available to the analytic development world.
All SQL scripts are stored to Coginiti’s version-controlled Catalog. This includes data pipeline scripts along with common parameterized queries to make it a cinch for analysts to pull just the right data for analysis.
Derek has enjoyed the ability to create extensible and modularized scripts using Coginiti’s Catalog. Any changes made to these referencable SQL code blocks are versioned and automatically cascade down to dependent scripts. Not only is Coginiti’s Catalog at the heart of Clear Box’s robust data infrastructure for CPG manufacturers, it has also enabled analytic collaboration as data engineers and analysts can easily share their most useful SQL code with one another.
Clear Box has also taken part in some early testing for CoginitiScript, a framework for functional code blocks integrated into the Coginiti Catalog which provides even more power an ease in building flexible SQL pipelines. Derek had a one-word, all-caps response when introduced to CoginitiScript: “WOW!”
