Everybody can benefit from the power of data without specific analytics or data science knowledge, as the company’s solutions provide an outcome that helps retailers manage their daily operations. They optimize commercial decision-making. The key focus areas are Assortment, Promotion, and Price to impact the predictability of revenue and margin truly.

It’s the consumer’s age, and companies that best adapt to their changing behavior will stay ahead. But with scattered data from many sources, traditional solutions grow complex, expensive, and outdated. Instead, brands and retailers should be responsive and agile, continuously turning insight into action to meet demand with the best possible offer.

A Unique Technology

In order to help retailers gain insights, PRIME processes clean their data, and visualize them through their solutions, using the most cutting-edge technologies that are powerful and sustainable in large-scalable applications. PRIME uses top-notch technology within its platform to master large amounts of data.

“I had been working in retail and trade for years before we launched PRIME. And like many retailers, I got frustrated about the amount of time and effort I was spending on tools and reports. Instead of helping us, using data became a drag and took all the fun out of my job,” explains Jolien De Jong, Founder & CEO of PRIME Retail & Trade Solutions. “Together with a partner and inspired by the DIY mentality of start-ups and growth hackers, we set out to create the data and insights platform we dreamed of. A platform that would relieve retailers from all the complexity of working with data, and instead help them fulfil their full potential.”

PRIME technology is cloud-based and designed and maintained by them. The company uses state-of-art technology standards to optimize its work. To remain flexible and fast, they created their own Visual Data Hub, helping them simultaneously manage large amounts of data to develop insights.

“On our base platform we have introduced solutions for Price, Promo and Assortment. This allows us to start small with, for example, optimizing pricing strategies and to roll out to promotion and/or assortment when the pricing solution is nicely embedded in the daily operations of our client,” elucidates Jolien. “To visualize the insights, we created our own BI platform. We did not want to be dependent on any of the existing BI solutions out there, simply because we cannot afford to wait in line for new updates or versions if we require a change which makes working with insights easier, faster, or more fun.”

Simultaneously, Jolien and her team realized that simple dashboards only sometimes help business users simplify their work. Endless hours are spent on cutting and pasting these dashboards in PowerPoint to make a smooth presentation for stakeholders. To overcome this, PRIME created Data Stories within its platform. A presentation layer can be linked to all data sources within a solution, automatically showing the latest data within a presentable form. The only thing a user needs to do is draw conclusions and work on improving or managing the business. An additional benefit is that everybody works with the same templates. So, all users present every report, category plan, or promotion calendar the same way.

Creating A Great Future

“What makes us different from our competitors is that many PRIME colleagues come from the retail sector. So, we are a tech company, but the PRIME Platform and Solutions are designed by people from retail and trade. Our motto is: At PRIME we breathe retail,” says. “We design and develop, the most important use cases to answer are: is this easy to use for a business user and does it fit perfectly well in a retail business process? If we find the technology too complex to explain to our internal retail-savvy people, then we are not ready to launch it. We really want to avoid confusing (potential) clients with complex technological standards. Our technology is complex, but it’s in our DNA to make sure that this complexity feels simple to our users.”

But most importantly, PRIME is a one-stop shop. The benefit of having one data insights provider for all business processes is that there is one single source of truth regarding data. Working within one platform instead of many increases efficiency and simplifies the onboarding of new colleagues. In one instance, one of PRIME’s clients was looking for a solution to help them increase efficiency in price, promo, and assortment management and to help clean their data. Before starting to work with PRIME, they had issues attracting the right team, and all data insights were updated manually every week. PRIME started by cleaning their data and constructed automated pipelines to generate basic reporting and insights using Data Stories. This sounds simple, but the result was that the increased efficiency meant that they did not have to fill two FTE vacancies. So, a fundamental start, however, dramatically impacts the retailers’ cost unit.

It is pertinent to mention that PRIME constantly seeks improvements in its solutions, making them faster, easier, or more easier to use. They will re-launch their updated promo solution soon, enabling clients to quickly build their annual promotion plan based on facts and results. Additionally, they are building on an advanced analytics module for their pricing strategy module. This will help clients easily set pricing strategies per category or product.

For the days to come, PRIME is working on new clients and is expanding its teams to facilitate clients in other regions. Their platform has been prepared to facilitate languages and work with most cloud providers, so they are ready to grow internationally. “What makes PRIME unique is our multi-disciplinary product teams working in two countries, namely The Netherlands and Kosovo,” adds Jolien. “We can only do what we do well by hiring and attracting the best people within their specific area of expertise. Our culture is very open and constructive. I’m a very proud Founder and CEO of this tech company with a unique culture and great products and solutions.”