SAS seals Sainsbury's deal

Business intelligence player SAS has signed a deal with Sainsbury's to provide collaborative tools for securely sharing store lay-out and display data with its suppliers.

The detailed plans, which are called 'planograms', determine how the supermarket presents products to its customers based on large amounts of data collected on sales and other factors such as consumer buying trends. This enables them to be smarter when pushing products and categories.

The deal comes as SAS announced it expects to see strong growth in the retail sector as store chains get smarter about the data they collect and the ways it can better serve their business.

The service being rolled out to Sainsbury's is based on Marketmax software which SAS brought into the fold through a 2003 acquisition.

Simon van Moppes, business unit director for Sainsbury's at Unilever UK, one of the supermarket's largest suppliers, said the secure collaboration tools will mean "less duplication of work and faster planogramming".

He added in a statement: "This will result in our being able to work with Sainsbury's more effectively to bring category and shopper insights to shelf in a faster time-frame."

John Dalton, MD of SAS UK, said retail in general represents a real boom area for business intelligence currently, adding SAS also works with John Lewis and Waitrose.

He said stores need to analyse data and while he admits anybody with a sense for retail needs can predict which events and seasonal trends need to be catered for – more turkeys at Christmas, more Pimms during the summer - he said the scale of the operation means it is a logistical balancing act which must weigh demand against the inefficiencies of wastage in terms of shelf space and perishable goods.

Dalton said: "We're not replacing the people. But technology is now better at predicting what's going to happen than people."