The article is about how Tesco supermarkets chain realized the value of its Clubcard to get the insight into its customers’ behaviors and received detailed data on two-thirds of all shopping baskets. Tesco used the big data analytics in predicting the demand of their customers and in overall better analysis of it supply chain. However, some things went wrong and results deviated from the expectations. So what is the big data in supply chain? A heaven-sent solution or a misleading beast?
Big data (BD) is not a …show more content…
BD can be all about extrapolations. Retail trends over the last few decades show a skew towards one-stop shopping. Technology played a disruptive role in it, and made it harder to make trend analysis out of retail loyalty card data. Perhaps it is more that Tesco weren’t really using their big data to understand customers (more of a marketing problem), and were treating it more as another commodity to trade with their suppliers.
The important aspect is the quality and reliability of data. Majority of data being generated was outside the company, considering the multiple suppliers and players, which is practically outside company’s control. This makes the data extraction with authenticity difficult.
Another challenge of working with data is that it is sometimes forgotten that the data we have is not ALL the data available. In case Of Tesco, Clubcard data was limited in two significant ways. Firstly, it was limited only to the customers with the card (which might possibly show those who were most loyal). If customers without cards begin to behave differently, it was not spotted. Secondly, the card only captured their transactions in Tesco stores: missing the world of their relationship with its