Sears, Roebuck and Company Boosts Productivity with InfiniteInsight®

Challenges

• Like many retailers, Sears realized it needed to find a way to compete in the volatile world of modern retail fueled by technology and flooded with competition.
• Sears modeling productivity was crippled by dwindling analytical resources.
• Deploying predictive analytic scores from the Teradata data warehouse into production required manual, redundant and time-consuming processes that were prone to human error. 

Solutions

• Standardized on InfiniteInsight® to optimize marketing processes including customer segmentation and targeted mailings.
• Automated the predictive analytics process including data preparation, modeling and score deployment.
• Built a 900-attribute data mart within the Teradata warehouse that combined information which spanned multiple channels, hundreds of brands combined with a wealth of customer data including credit history, market demographics, and external sources such as mail-order overlays.
• InfiniteInsight® allows Sears to apply scores directly in-database to their Teradata data warehouse.  

Results

• Eliminated labor-intensive, high-maintenance and repetitive tasks.
• Reduced the time to build accurate, robust models to a few hours rather than a few weeks.
• Using a central Teradata data warehouse gives the catalog team a highly scalable computing and storage environment while reducing operational costs.
• Modeling and scoring directly within their Teradata warehouse results in hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual savings.
• Able to score 75 million customers in 30 minutes, down from several hours which results in significant savings.
• Realized a welcome and unexpected benefit: business partners, analysts, and merchandising colleagues are asking more “what if” questions because answers are immediate – often within 10 minutes.
• Automation allows analysts to build more sophisticated models than they could with conventional predictive analytics solutions.