Analysing information from transactions in real time can enable retailers to boost sales and discover banking errors, according to Juan Luis Carselle, assistant director of IT strategic planning and information security at Walmart Mexico and Central America.
Speaking exclusively to Computing at ISACA's World Congress Insights 2013 in Berlin today, Carselle said that having a tool that can analyse transactions in stores would enable the global retailer to spot trends and act accordingly.
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"For example, if credit cards were getting an error code on each transaction there could be something wrong with the issuing authoriser's switcher, meaning that we could identify the problem before the issuer realises they have a problem," he said.
This would not only benefit the credit card companies, but also the retailer in question.
"If you recognised something that means that customers could walk away without merchandise, then it makes a difference [to sales] if you know of the problem straight away," Carselle said.
Another way that transactions can be used to the benefit of supermarkets such as Walmart is to identify how many checkouts are being used in a store at any given time.
"A traditional way to have done this would be to have a central monitoring area that could have some sort of agent that would be working to validate which checkouts are being used, but if you have a tool that's analysing transactions for the checkouts, then instead of making an additional investment for a checkout tool, you can analyse transactional data that the company already has to hand," Carselle explained.
"So if a store manager thinks he or she has 25 checkouts working, maybe they only have five - this could be related to staff issues or technical issues, but the main point is that you are using existing data," he added.
Carselle emphasised that the biggest shift in paradigm is that the organisation does not need to store information in the same, structured way that it has in the past.
"You should be able to analyse it in the raw format that it is today. If you're gathering data and trying to create a database that is structured then you are too late. By the time you get that it will take a day to get that analysed and stored and indexed so you can start using it - you need to be able to analyse that in real time so you can react," he said.
Other data such as the transactional data from Walmart's e-commerce section or data from its social feeds can also inevitably boost sales, Carselle suggested.
"If you start seeing trends or positive comments on an item then you can increase the advertising for the item in real time - the information is already there, it is about getting access," he said.
