What is Embedded Analytics? Proximix builds an embedded analytics solution with the ForePaaS Platform. The company transforms retail using omnichannel analytics and Machine Learning.
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytics and machine learning content within business applications, such as eCommerce applications to help companies work smarter by incorporating relevant insight to solve high-value business problems.
Context: The customer journey in the omnichannel era
From search to delivery, through order, payment, support... What matters to customers today is access to the product they want. Whatever the channel. Frictionless.
This is also the mission of Proximis, which delivers a Unified Commerce platform for retailers; a global solution to ensure that both online and offline work well together. This mission requires that the most up to date and relevant tools are provided to their customers, giving them the overview necessary to ensure the best possible purchase experience, whether this be in their online store, or traditional retail store. It also requires embedded analytics in business applications such as eCommerce.
To meet these new expectations and enable the smoothest consumer journey possible, retailers need to access as much information as they can along the entire buyer journey, from order to payment and return. Hence the importance of having an integrated reporting tool that cross-references and centralizes their commerce metrics.
Challenge: The right data for better eCommerce optimization
The platform, as originally designed by Proximis, allows the user to manage catalogs, stocks, orders, payments, and returns in incredible detail. But the user experience still lacked a reporting module ensuring visibility on all of these operations. We had to find a way to make the most of the existing data, with an optimal time-to-market, data management and analytics not being the core business of Proximis.
Proximis' information system has been built according to a transactional logic, which corresponds to the type of service offered but makes it hard to bring a reporting logic to the table and build a solution with embedded analytics. It was therefore necessary to re-imagine their analytics solution and build it from scratch.
Solution: embedded analytics and machine learning
The benefits expected by Proximis were numerous, including:
- Accelerate time-to-market for the analytics featureset to be able to focus on the core value proposition, Unified Commerce
- Improve user experience by offering an optimal Business Intelligence experience
- Anchor their competitive advantage by providing a differentiating analytics service that encourages customer engagement and loyalty
By leveraging the ForePaaS Platform, the company could quickly provide their clients with an embedded analytics solution with an interactive reporting component and fully integrated into the existing back-office. Transactional data, coming from Proximis database, had been extracted, exported, and transformed onto the ForePaaS platform, before being shared through reporting dashboards, according to the KPIs defined by Proximis.
The longer term objective is to add smart features, towards anomalies detection, trends recognition, recommendations and flow optimization.
Besides, Proximis offers more than a standard analytics plan, allowing their clients to connect data directly to their systems via APIs, or developing their own advanced indicators and predictive models specific to their activity or e-commerce focus.