Towards  2016 - 3
Bangalore, December 18 2015:
Sudipta Ghosh, Partner, Data and Analytics, PwC India suggests  Emerging Trends in  Retail Analytics to watch out for in 2016:
·        Fraud detection and prevention will be an important concern for retailers  looking to build security and preserve consumer trust. Using analytics, retailers can identify unusual patterns of product and inventory movement.
·        Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers will increasingly provide substantially more data on product movements and locations for retailers to analyse. Retailers will be using analytics to optimise their inventory and reduce their transportation costs.  
·        Workforce analytics will help organizations effectively plan their future workforce needs to increase labour efficiency and improve schedule effectiveness. Analytical tools would be used for workforce acquisition and labour scheduling based on when customers are most likely to visit a store.
·        Retailers will increasingly adopt multiple IoT technologies in the coming years to reshape the customer experience, to drive loyalty and to focus on inventory. The use cases in retail will include sensors on products, interactive consumer engagement, automated store lighting, shopper intelligence, perishable tracking, fleet operations tracking etc.
·        There will be an increase in video analytics as powerful processors are becoming available at affordable price points to video surveillance manufacturers. Video surveillance with analytical models can be used for effective in store promotions, stock out analysis and tracking customer movement inside the store.

Rise and growth of e- commerce or digitisation of retail has been one of the key trends in the retail sector. As this digitisation continues in the new year, companies will turn to analytical solutions to both manage and make sense of the huge amount of data being churned from these transactions. Companies will require insights into the consumer behaviours to try and personalise user experience as competition will hot up between various e-commerce retailers.
These companies are already investing in significant social media management to promote their services and will also turn to analytics to gain insight from that data regarding their product perception and target market. App based analytics solutions will be at the forefront of this growth as the market will shift from laptop to smart phone based solutions. New age analytics solutions like using CCTV for eyeball tracking, Planogram optimisation, single view of customer to create shopper profile and anticipate needs better, analysing supplier and employee performance and compliance (attrition analytics, workforce planning),  are all seeing an uptake in the Indian market.
Big decisions in retail  (infographic)