SPIN®

SPIN is an Analytical Processing tool designed to provide retailers with relevant, timely and detailed business information. It enables the execution of critical business decisions for the retail industry and it can be utilized to perform many of the decision support functions important in the Buyer’s WorkMate process flow.

Key Functions

	Dashboard driven Executive and Management Performance Summaries.
	Focuses on retail data analysis that enables interactive query, execution and reporting.
	Decision Support Engine that focuses on merchandise performance from a product and location perspective.
	Provides timely analysis of target data sets establishes comprehensive business information data sources (data mart) that can be accessed on demand.
	Analyzes historical performance of merchandise assortments within the product and location hierarchies.
	Analyzes historical performance by product and location attributes or characteristics at the desired level of detail including SKU-Store in order to identify and evaluate performance trends.

Key Features

	An intuitive, interactive grid and a suite of standard business charts allow typical analysis functions, but go the extra mile by supporting fast queries against even the largest databases.
	Advanced visualization capabilities, such as Decomposition Tree and Perspective, provide greater understanding of complex business information, and solve the specific analytic problems decision makers deal with daily.
	SPIN provides the environment for driving live key performance indicators (KPIs) to decision makers. Analysts and those responsible for creating and sharing analyses with others organize key findings via Briefing Books and have many methods of distribution at their fingertips.
	Provide store location rankings and percent contribution for any metric or product set.
	Build trend tables for use as a basis for allocation of merchandise to store locations.
	Create a feed to Buyer’s WorkMate Assortment Planning, Purchasing and Allocation modules.
	Generate target purchase quantities based on historical performance.
	Generate size performance contribution tables by store location for export to Buyer’s WorkMate.
	Provide analysis for pricing decisions and the execution of markdown strategies.

Using a standard Windows® graphical user interface (GUI), SPIN provides a flexible, interactive environment that does not require new programming each time the user changes the analytical criteria or the desired output format.

SPIN utilizes a Data Warehouse built on Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 Data Base Management System (DBMS) model. A “multi-dimensional data model” supports SPIN functions with a processing interface known as analytical processing.  Microsoft’s SQL Server’s Analysis Services functions are used to build and maintain the “cube.”