QuantiSense Announces Version 4.5 of Its Retail-Centric Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Application at NRF 2009

QuantiSense today announced Version 4.5 of its retail-specific Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing application. Building upon the company’s groundbreaking approach to Business Intelligence, QuantiSense 4.5 brings new power, ease of use and flexibility to BI for retail. The latest release will be demonstrated at booth #1471 at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Convention and Expo, Jan. 12 and 13, 2009.

Designed to give retailers a powerful start with implementation in 100 days, QuantiSense 4.5 builds upon the application’s role-based approach to Business Intelligence. The newest release includes significant enhancements to the application’s personalized dashboards; increased flexibility; an enhanced library of retail business metrics; and a greatly expanded number of QuantiSense Playbooks®, which capture retail best practices and guide users to take immediate action to improve their business.

“We’ve incorporated a great deal of our customers’ feedback into the QuantiSense 4.5 release and have added some exciting new Playbooks to the roster,” said Jeff Buck, CEO, QuantiSense. “Our goal with the 4.5 release is to further expand the possibilities of what retailers can do to respond to the performance insights that QuantiSense provides.”

“QuantiSense has proven an attractive partner for specialty soft and hard goods retailers, particularly among those implementing their first formal BI strategy and looking for relatively rapid deployment (the goal is under 100 days) and lower total project costs resulting from lower implementation and consulting expense,” said Janet Suleski, Senior Retail Research Analyst, AMR Research.1

Enhanced Playbooks. QuantiSense Release 4.5 includes new Playbooks for major retail roles, allowing users to take actions that will increase sales and improve the return on inventory. Playbooks provide a great leap forward in Business Intelligence, replacing exhaustive status reports with streamlined Playbooks that help users quickly solve problems and take advantage of opportunities. New Playbooks include:

• Store Management Playbook: Includes plays that help managers increase cross- and up-selling at stores; take steps to improve sales of a chain’s hottest products at underperforming stores; and analyze sales performance by store and department.
• Planner Playbook: With plays that help planners forecast for upcoming seasons more accurately by measuring store performance based on a number of attributes, or over a well-defined interval; measure sales that were lost due to merchandise stock-outs; and identify stores and departments with the greatest deviation from the merchandise plan.
• Allocator Playbook: Allocator plays can greatly increase the effectiveness of allocations by helping users compute the need to replenish stores down to specific inventory per store in each category; balance the proportion of full price, promotional or clearance goods per store; and prevent stock-outs in the stores by correcting shortages at the DC and transferring merchandise to problem stores.
• Buyer Playbook: Includes plays that help buyers identify the best-selling SKUs in order to accelerate production and availability in stores; determine quality problems with suppliers; identify merchandise that requires markdowns to optimize sell-through; and much more.

Rich, Interactive User Dashboards. Release 4.5 includes major enhancements to the user dashboards, providing retailers with a role-based view of their business and exception reports that allow users to pinpoint problems and take advantage of business opportunities. Dashboards are available with three topical views – by Product, Channel, or Vendor – for each of the five roles in the retail enterprise: Executive, Buyer, Planner, Allocator and Store Management. QuantiSense dashboards now use Flash technology with a simple, user-friendly interface that enhances user productivity. In addition, dashboards are now portable and can be accessed both online and offline.

Enhanced Library of Retail Business Metrics. The latest version includes over 1,000 retail metrics, with many added to enhance visibility into opportunities and issues within dashboards, as well as support decision making within specific Playbooks. Some examples of QuantiSense’s built-in retail metrics include Pull Metrics for determining how an item or department drives incremental add-on sales in dollars and units; Top Need Metrics for determining which classes or stores have the highest or lowest need for additional product; Upswing Metrics to highlight top products and locations that are trending up from previous week’s sales; and many more.

Flexible Deployment. QuantiSense version 4.5 provides flexible deployment options. It can be implemented as an end-to-end BI and data warehousing solution or can seamlessly integrate with a retailer’s existing data warehouse, allowing companies that have already invested in a data warehouse to take advantage of QuantiSense’s retail-specific business intelligence capabilities. QuantiSense helps these retailers leverage their data warehousing investment and achieve a great leap forward by enabling them to turn the data they’re already collecting into insightful, actionable information.

About QuantiSense

QuantiSense is the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing applications exclusively for retailers. Customers include Burlington Coat Factory, Casual Male Retail Group, The Guitar Center, Hallmark Cards, Pacific Sunwear, Restoration Hardware, and Spencer’s. Implemented in 100 days, the QuantiSense application features a best-practices retail data warehouse, and ETL designed to integrate quickly with retail source systems and any database platform. Users conduct analysis using QuantiSense's packaged analytics, reports, and role-based dashboards tailored for executives, buyers, planners, allocators, and additional roles throughout the retail enterprise. The revolutionary QuantiSense Playbooks® empower retailers with a collection of role-based scenarios and situational analysis to drive process throughout the enterprise and guide users to the appropriate actions every time. To learn more, visit QuantiSense at www.quantisense.com.

1 Source: Janet Suleski, AMR Research, “Business Intelligence Keeps the Momentum Going,” 2/07.