Riteway Compares Options in AWS Marketplace, Chooses Spotfire for 93% Faster Insights

Drowning in Data

Anyone who has searched an unfamiliar grocery store for, say, a jar of honey knows that there can be wide variation in each store’s approach to product location, grouping, and pricing.

These variations are no accident. Product placement, proximity to similar items, and pricing can affect customer behavior, so grocery chains think strategically about these factors. At the same time, the brands that produce these products have their own strategic goals for placements and price points for their products.

Riteway Sales and Marketing, a member of BeaconUnited, operates in the middle. “My team helps brands, and our sales team understand trends and opportunities at particular retailers,” says Elisa Westlund, director of insights and marketing at Riteway. “We’re trying to determine the price point and placement that get the greatest lift for a product."

Providing such information is a data-heavy undertaking that gets heavier with each passing year. “Data growth created a real problem as we passed the capabilities of spreadsheet software," says Westlund. "We get scanned point-of-sale universal product codes from retailers, and a lot of the data is unusable in its raw state, so our analysts were spending most of their time cleaning it and couldn't perform the in-depth analysis we wanted to provide our customers."

The team started searching for new tools. "AWS Marketplace made it incredibly easy to find and compare SaaS options, so we looked at about 50 data visualization tools,” says Westlund. "We wanted to be able to visualize data in multiple ways, use geographic coding so we could map the data to store locations, and have access to predictive analytics and modeling. We also wanted the solution to be intuitive enough that our sales teams wouldn't need analyst assistance, and we also didn't want our clients to have to download an app to view our visualizations and dashboards."

Spotfire Answers the Call

Riteway chose TIBCO Spotfire for Amazon Web Services (AWS), an analytics software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution designed for data exploration, which is available in AWS Marketplace. "Spotfire set itself apart not only with its flexibility and scalability, but also with its interactive graphics," says Westlund. "You click on a graphic, and two or three others show you which data is affected. It’s a ‘wow’ factor that sets us apart with our customers and partners."

TIBCO, an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network, offers Spotfire in AWS Marketplace because so many of its customers are already on AWS. "Our decision to offer Spotfire was driven by the fact that most of our customers are already using AWS and want a service that can be easily integrated with those existing solutions," says Brad Hopper, the vice president of product strategy for TIBCO. "We also wanted to take advantage of the breadth, sophistication, and easy scalability of AWS services."

With the new solution, Westlund’s team can produce analytics much more quickly. "With Spotfire for AWS, time-to-insight is 93 percent faster than before," says Westlund. "It used to take us a week to analyze a product category. Now, I can complete the analysis in hours."

Faster analysis has transformed the work and role of the Riteway analytics team. "With TIBCO Spotfire, our analysts have the time to really partner with the brands we work with," says Westlund. "Instead of building reports, we’re utilizing the tool to build insights."

Analysis That Opens Doors

Riteway is using the solution to deliver additional value to its retail partners, too. "Retailers, who often used to be closed to interaction, began to open their doors," says Westlund. "With Spotfire, we can answer more detailed questions about item duplication and trends within attributes. When we can give retailers information they need, it helps build stronger relationships.

The Riteway analytics team's internal partners are also impressed by these new capabilities. "It’s been really fun to walk our business users through and show them how easily they can identify the trends for the products they're responsible for," says Westlund. "We've achieved 100 percent adoption among our business users, and that's because TIBCO Spotfire is so easy for them to use and understand."

The solution's ease of use is improving collaboration among company teams. "Because we can refresh live data and analytics so quickly, it's bringing the sales team to the analytics team with meaningful, actionable questions that help both teams find additional value in the data," says Westlund. "And because it's all in the cloud, other divisions can easily access the data we've cleaned and the analytics we've produced. With TIBCO Spotfire, I can take the data with me in a way I never could before."

New Wins Deliver 100 Percent ROI in Year One

Most important of all, the solution has helped Riteway win new business—and enough of it to achieve 100 percent return on investment in just one year. "Because TIBCO Spotfire helps us answer questions on the fly, it has played a key role in getting us in the door with new clients and helping them succeed with new promotions and shelf items," says Westlund. "The solution absolutely paid for itself within the first year."

Westlund sees the new solution as crucial to the company's future strategy. "Without the powerful capabilities of TIBCO Spotfire, I wouldn't have the same interaction with retailers. Over the next three years, the qualitative analytics and consumer attributing we can do with this solution will become vital for determining what the consumer is doing versus what they’re saying."