Retail is an area that has gotten a significant boost in terms of Business Intelligence the recent years. Retail is by far the area that allows you the best entrance to customer insights, and hence is something that more companies have got an interest in exploring.
Social media and general traffic on web pages can be used actively to optimize your marketing efforts, by eventually bringing down cost per click by targeting specifically chosen custom groups. Working with marketing channels for different customer segments can generate much higher dimensional granularity than you are used to. For instance a cost measure for each customer segment per product per region for a given time period.
These multitude of dimensional significance greatly increase the amount of data that you need to manage.
If you moreover want to combine marketing costs per product with the overall cost of production and handling costs extrapolated from ERP data, you introduce a need to look across more data sources, and aligning data properties that may be hard to align.
Creating and thinking this kind of complexity into your data model is key, when attempting to utilize your Retail data to generate value.
