Q&A: Paul Boyle, CEO, Retail Insight

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Retail Insight is a leading provider of advanced analytics software that optimizes grocery retail store operations by driving data-driven profitability and productivity.

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I graduated with a Masters in Engineering and became CEO of Retail Insight in 2011. Prior to that, I was COO of the company since its founding in 2005. Prior to Retail Insight, I worked in commercial and strategy at consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, including Procter & Gamble (P&G) and HJ Heinz.

What does your company do? / What is your USP?

Retail Insight is a leading provider of advanced analytics software that optimizes grocery retail store operations, driving profitability and productivity through data. The insights we deliver help retailers address their biggest challenges, including product availability, food waste management, inventory accuracy and operational efficiency.

Put simply, Retail Insight’s goal is to help grocery retailers and consumer goods manufacturers leverage the power of their data to maximize the full sales and profit potential of their stores.

Our API-first software solutions ingest core retailer data such as point-of-sale, inventory, product, and ERP information, unlocking valuable insights to drive profitability. Our solutions seamlessly integrate with existing technology stacks, lowering the investment barrier by increasing scalability and unlocking additional value in the technology ecosystem.

Retail Insight’s USP is that our solutions are powered by cognitive technology; a unique combination of human expertise and advanced mathematical techniques. It can incorporate AI and ML where appropriate, but enables a more pragmatic, practical and impactful approach to decision-making. This is a powerful combination that is incredibly difficult to replicate and has been proven to increase sales, reduce losses and improve retail efficiency.

This enables us to deliver actionable insights and generate unprecedentedly fast results, which is why we are trusted to process 10% of the world’s retail data, which translates to 2 trillion calculations per week.

For example, in 2023, we delivered over $600 million in gross profit to our clients, delivering an average return on investment (ROI) of over 30x. We also helped retailers reduce their carbon footprint by preventing over 225,000 tons of waste.

What is unique about this platform and your approach?

To use a football analogy, we help our customers attack or defend. Attack means helping our customers increase sales. For example, Retail Insight’s availability systems focus on helping identify shelf gaps or barriers to sales – we help retailers fix them and increase their overall sales performance and margins.

When we defend, we help retailers understand where they may be letting profit slip through their fingers. That’s where our waste solution, WasteInsight comes into play. For example, when you have a product that is approaching its expiration date, it often ends up as waste. But we can help retailers price it more effectively to get what is still good product into the hands of customers rather than into landfill, thereby avoiding the costs of product waste and disposal, as well as the negative environmental impact of food waste.

Both attack and defense become easier when they are based on insights derived from data analysis – and that is where Retail Insight comes in.

Which retailers do you work with and how do they use your solution?

Retail Insight is trusted by over 30 of the world’s leading grocery and consumer goods retailers, including Asda, Kroger, Co-op and Sprouts.

We have been supporting Asda stores since 2009, using our solutions to improve stock replenishment and availability. We recently partnered with them to help them deal with phantom stock. This involved taking basic store data from across Asda’s estate and combining it with our ListInsight solution that identifies and corrects incorrect inventory records to improve store efficiency.

ListInsight trained a data model for each of Asda’s stores using sales and inventory data to detect instances of phantom stock. It alerts store associates to manually check shelf stock and update the stock file to improve overall store efficiency, correcting stock accuracy and improving product availability and sales. In just nine months, we helped Asda remove over 1.6 million units of phantom stock from its store estate, delivering a 63x return on investment.

We also work with Scotmid Co-op to reduce food waste and increase operational efficiency in store.

The Scotmid Cooperative uses our WasteInsight, a solution that empowers retailers to control food waste with data-driven, actionable insights that support all waste-related paths for businesses. It also enables dynamic price reductions, manages expiration dates, offers more efficient charitable donations and provides improved forecasting accuracy, enabling retailers to sell more with less waste.

By implementing WasteInsight, Scotmid Co-op was able to optimise price reductions on expiring goods using a dynamic data-driven model, ensuring more food ended up in customers’ baskets and not in landfill. This resulted in a 1.83% increase in product sales year-on-year, and 42.7 tonnes of food waste was saved from Scotmid Co-op landfill, equating to a 37 tonne reduction in CO2 impact to landfill.

What challenges will retailers face in 2024?

I think one of the biggest challenges, especially for grocery retailers, is there are a lot fewer employees in the stores, but maybe also more work because they have to deal with a much more complex order fulfillment process.

Where a store used to have 20 to 40 managers, now it might be four to five. At the management level, it’s a much smaller group managing stores with $50 million in sales. So, for the few employees that they do have, whether it’s at the management level or on the shop floor, they need to be augmented with better technology, data and analytics to help them focus on the right tasks at the right time. That way, they’ll drive much-needed operational efficiencies to manage sales and profitability.

Where do you see retail evolving over the next five years? And what will be retailers’ biggest priorities?

For all businesses, profit is becoming increasingly important. Retailers need to achieve market share growth through sustainable means, sound economics and good decision-making – everything from where they open their stores, to where they are currently located, to where they need to be rationalised. And also by considering their proposition to the customers they are targeting. Marks & Spencer is an example of a retailer that is really getting it right at the moment. It has focused on the fundamentals of good retail – a great proposition, constant innovation, fuller stores and well-staffed at the right times.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations are also huge components of decision-making. Doing the right thing for the bottom line at the same time as influencing ESG is becoming increasingly important. With our WasteFor example, with Insight, we generate huge savings for our customers, but we also divert many products from landfills into the hands of their customers – reducing CO₂ emissions in the process. The influence of ESG on retail decision-making will continue to grow and grow.

We’ve seen a huge shift in understanding data and what it can do for the retail world over the last 20 years. When we started at Retail Insight, we spent a lot of time evangelizing about how retailers could use data. But a lot of people weren’t so sure about that. That’s changed a lot. We have exponentially more data, much more powerful analytics, and at the same time, a new generation of data-savvy retailers taking over the industry. The future of data-driven retail is very exciting.

What advice would you give to retailers who want to get better quality analytics data?

A lot of people think, “Let’s just put all the data we have in one place and then let the data guide us. If we put all of that together, eventually some random patterns or probabilities will materialize and present themselves to us.” The approach we took at Retail Insight was much more determined.

We’re not a solution looking for a problem. We have very specific retail problems in mind that we’re trying to solve to make life easier for our customers. So my advice to retailers is don’t try to boil the ocean. Be very specific about the problems that you’re trying to solve. Then work with experts who understand those problems to figure out exactly what data you need to solve them. Instead of pulling out all the data and hoping for the best, be really deliberate and specific about the data that you’re asking for in relation to the problems that you’re trying to solve.

Another challenge is not designing the solution itself. There are simple and elegant ways to present information that can trigger action. There is always a tendency to spit out as much information as possible, but what we are really trying to achieve is maximum impact with minimum intervention.