In the fast paced business world that you work in today, leveraging timely and accurate information is a key factor for maximizing your success at retail. Speed to insight relies on the intuitive presentation of information integrated from numerous sources to answer pressing questions in a matter of minutes, rather than hours or days. Taking the necessary time to manipulate data in spreadsheets is usually not an effective or available option due to limited budgets and lack of time. Some retail analysts are known to spend as much as 80% of their valuable time cutting and pasting in spreadsheets, rather than focusing on proper retail execution. Velocity can help you flip that ratio so that more time can be spent ensuring that your product is on the shelf for the consumer exactly when it needs to be.

Velocity helps easily uncover how products are selling and where action needs to be taken. Velocity's dynamic drilling capabilities provide business users with the ability to quickly view chain-level information by item and item attribute (or segmentation), and drill down to store or store attribute (store cluster) to investigate the "why" behind selling or inventory trends. The information can be viewed as a table, chart, graph, grid or histogram and all are drillable and configurable by the user. All information can be exported for further integration with Excel®, Word® or Powerpoint®.

Along with the Analysis module, Velocity also provides a sophisticated reporting tool and web-based dashboard interface which enables further drilldowns and analysis. An ODBC connection can also be created to enable a direct link of Velocity's data warehouse into Excel® to automatically update spreadsheets with the updated sales results from retailers.

Many Velocity users employ a comprehensive, proactive drilling technique in their search for the root causes of out-of-stocks (OOS) or low selling situations on new products or promotions. Utilizing the powerful data mining capabilities of Velocity's relational database and the Analysis tool, they can quickly identify any opportunities down to the store and item level in order to maximize their ROI on their trade promotion spending and product roll-out investments.

Identifying item or store-specific opportunities in Analysis can also be performed with just a few mouse clicks. For instance, if your objective is to have no less than 14 pieces on hand of a product at any group of stores, you can monitor your on hand positions with the histogram below. The two bars on the left in blue and green, tell us that 11 stores total are out of the acceptance range. You can then click on each bar to get a quick listing of these stores that can be immediately printed, copied and pasted or exported to Excel for further analysis or used to generate a store-specific order or VMI recommendation in the Report Center.