Crisp and Databricks bring supply chain visibility to the lakehouse

The new integration provides brands with a live feed of sales and supply chain data within Databricks to power real-time insights and action. 

Building the CPG data cloud

There’s a data evolution underway in CPG as companies migrate their infrastructure from on-premise data warehouses into the cloud, enabling flexible and powerful new ways to store and leverage data. Databricks offers a unique solution for cloud adopters in the form of a data “lakehouse”, unifying the best of data warehouses and data lakes to support a host of data, analytics and AI use cases. 

Despite the growing cloud migration across CPG, the process of sharing data between retailers, distributors, and suppliers remains hindered by legacy systems. Accessing and aggregating retail data typically takes significant time and resources, as CPG brands have to manually download and synthesize hundreds of reports from various vendor portals before exporting it into the cloud.

As a retail data collaboration platform, Crisp facilitates seamless data sharing between suppliers, distributors, and retailers. Crisp will become the first partner on Databricks’ Retail Data Lakehouse that enables CPG customers to leverage a live feed of harmonized retail POS and supply chain data directly within their cloud environment.

The new integration meets the need of CPG suppliers to leverage real-time, granular, data for improved supply chain visibility. With Crisp’s automated data ingestion from 40+ retailer and distributor data sources, CPG suppliers can now avoid hours and resources typically required to make this data actionable to downstream teams – including aggregating, cleaning, and harmonizing data sets. This data can then be gracefully integrated into Databricks’ lakehouse platform, which can combine structured and unstructured data sets, perform analysis, and support custom applications on top of the data.

Enabling an agile supply chain

Today’s retail environment requires greater agility than ever before to keep up with evolving consumer behavior and ongoing supply chain challenges. The integration of Crisp and Databricks enables CPG teams to better respond to daily events, forecast for the future, and refine operations and merchandising strategies in real time.

The integration enables insights including:

• Out-of-stocks:  With up-to-date sales and inventory data, suppliers can monitor supply levels at Distribution Centers and retail stores alongside projected sales to allocate inventory and keep shelves stocked. At the same time, timely visibility into excess or aging inventory can help suppliers and retailers collaborate to reduce spoilage and waste.
• Sales and merchandising: With day-to-day visibility into sales performance at the store level, retailers and suppliers can work together to capitalize on trends, optimize assortments, measure the impact of promotions, and refine merchandising strategies. Ultimately, this helps brands expand distribution while also driving performance in stores, benefiting both their brand and their retail partners.
• Forecasting and planning: An aggregated analysis of top-line trends can inform everything along the supply chain, including Sales & Operational Planning. With access to current and historical data across all retail locations, analysts can improve forecasting to inform product assortments, demand planning, and operations for the year ahead.

“The expanded data access and analytical capabilities will empower teams with the insights they need for better supply chain forecasting and OOS monitoring, which are essential to achieve greater distribution with retail partners,” explains Rob Saker, RVP, Global Industry Leader for Retail & Manufacturing at Databricks. “Ultimately, this increase in data-driven collaboration enables higher-performing supply chains, more efficient use of resources, and the ability to better meet the needs of consumers.”

To learn more about Crisp’s integration with Databricks, contact us today for a demo. For more industry news and product updates, subscribe to the blog.