Mining the Sales Receipt Data for Greater Business Efficiency

In today’s era of digitalisation, many businesses are constantly evolving and adapting to ensure that their operations remain effective and offerings stay relevant in the current market.

As such, businesses need to be able to read data more accurately and respond accordingly to ensure they are competitive, especially for the brick-and-mortar retailers as more e-commerce players adopt data analytics to scale and reach their customers.

In 2016, 98.5% of the business establishments in Malaysia are made up of SMEs, which is equivalent to a total of 907,065 establishments. Also, Malaysia’s SMEs contributes 36.6% Of Malaysia’s GDP, with this number increased to 37.1% in 2017 and expected to reach 41% by 2020.

Based on these numbers alone, SMEs plays a crucial role in supporting the Malaysian economic growth. As such, it is important for SMEs to understand the challenges that hinder the growth of their business so to ensure sustainability.

Retail Pain Points

One of the common issues affecting the retail industry is the lack of concrete and systematic business intelligence. Collection of data is often done manually and it becomes more complicated if a business owner operates multiple outlets. This contributes to a lack of consistent data collection and easy to understand information to assist in their decision making.

Often, poor business or loss of profit is also attributed to the lack of customers. While this may be true, shrinkage and pilferage also lead to loss of merchandise, opportunities or cash collection on the shop floor and at the point-of-sale. This further shrinks the bottom-line of business owners.

On the flip side of the coin, when a business grows, retailers may also find themselves restricted in their own business expansion due to limited resources to manage and monitor growth. As such, opportunities to scale up their retail business may sometimes not be fully capitalised.

Given this situation, retail entrepreneurs today seek for solutions that enable them to stay relevant in the current retail landscape, especially one that is affordable, easy to use, and compatible with their existing infrastructure.

The Solution

Commenting on this ‘gap’, Vernon Chua, Founder and CEO of Innergia Labs said, “Analysis of sales data is crucial for retailers to remain relevant in today’s fast-changing retail landscape.”

SYCARDA stands for the Systematic Collection and Analysis of Retail Data, and is inspired by the real-life cicada, an insect symbolizing immortality, rebirth and transformation.

SYCARDA automatically collects sales data by tracking every transaction as it happens and from each point-of-sale (POS). Data is then transferred to the cloud for analysis. The users can login to the user-friendly SYCARDA web portal to keep track of their real-time business analytics.

Furthermore, SYCARDA is able to detect and flag any suspicious transactions.

SYCARDA works on top of a retailer’s existing POS infrastructure, so they do not need to spend large amounts on new hardware or software. It can be adopted across different retail sectors and formats such as supermarkets, health and beauty, pharmacies and F&B and other retail businesses that operate with a POS.

In a nutshell, SYCARDA is a platform that helps retailers collect their sales data automatically from their points-of-sale (POS) without the need for integration by digitizing and analysing every receipt as they are printed. This is a simple plug-and-play architecture that retailers can easily deploy and extend across multiple sites and even chains as they scale up their businesses and with minimum disruption to their operations.