"It's dramatically reduced the time needed for these projects," says Sears Holdings CTO Philip Shelley. "Because we have large granular data sets without the delays of finding data, it's taken weeks out of campaign delivery times.

"It's involved a huge mindset change relevant to keeping data," he adds. "Now we don't throw anything away, theoretically, ever."

Now, for example, if Sears wants to analyze the role of seasonality in the supply chain at an item level, "we have eight years of history at a detailed level. We can do the same things with pricing, because we have much more history than ever before, at the customer and the product level," says Shelley. "This allows us to make more meaningful offers and achieve better conversion with our campaigns, and also to lower inventory levels but achieve higher service levels. We saw lower inventories in 2012 but higher sales, and that kind of supply chain optimization is only possible with that level of detail."

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Keywords: retail supply chain, inventory management, inventory control, Big Data, supply chain management, inventory management systems, supply chain solutions, supply chain management IT, sourcing solutions