I met today with Paul Burke from RPM. RPM is a New Zealand company that provides personalised, plain-English advice to retailers, obtained through an analysis of their POS data and a comparison with data from other stores within the group. Below is the sort of action plan they deliver to the retail store;
Their solution resonated with me – benchmarking is an important aspect of business health, but one that is often difficult to implement.
In essence RPM takes the screeds of raw data already available from the POS system and, rather than provide yet another analysis of the data, it takes the next stage and converts the analysis into action points, small plain-English steps the retailer can take to improve their performance. They also produce their “scoreboard” which depicts benchmarking data under a number of metrics across the areas of sales, stock and staff – all obtained from a comparison with other stores within the group.
RPM is ideally suited to retail groups with 10 or more stores – at this level meaningful comparative statistics can be obtained from the data. RPM have already rolled out their solution to a number of retail chains such as Kodak Express, Hardy’s and PaperPlus – they’re now in the process of engineering for scale and obtaining funding to build their customer base. More information in this PDF.
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. 