Rachael Hadaway | Source | Senior Vice President, Product Management at SymphonyAI Retail CPG

The blend of physical and digital has no doubt created massive conflicts. Online and physical realms are changing and merging, with analysts and experts agreeing that there will continue to be a sizeable upward swing in online grocery. What won’t change, however, is how quickly and accurately customers will want their orders. Executing this successfully from a planning perspective has evolved beyond the shelf and turned into a complex challenge around all sides of the store: from curbside to the front of the store to the back room. Having best practices in place to foster quicker execution, greater shopper satisfaction and enhanced profitability will be essential for grocer success.

The rise of these citizen data scientists can be attributed to two factors. First, advances in analytic solutions have made diverse and large datasets more accessible, bypassing the need for advanced technical degrees or manual coding to interpret the information. And secondly, omnichannel shopping inherently enables retailers and CPGs to capture more data, generating more detail, and thus more insights than ever before. The volume of data and speed with which it flows adds a new dimension to the parameters considered in this conversation