Improvising Analytics Delivery: One UPC, Three Problems
Following a single product code through collection, mapping, and a retail sales data feed to show that analytics delivery is fundamentally a triage and sequencing problem.
Delivering analytics is a balancing act: stakeholder needs on one side, the limits of your systems on the other, and the space in between is where you improvise.
UPCs and ASINs are unglamorous, but in a licensing business they are the connective tissue between manufacturing, retail placement, and sell-through data. When they are not collected and mapped systematically, every downstream use case suffers: retail sales analysis, inventory monitoring, white space analysis, and decisions about future launches. Make collection too easy and the data is unstructured and unreliable, make it too rigid and partners do not comply, and that tradeoff has a real, measurable cost.
This talk follows a single product UPC through three analytics problems, from collection through mapping and into a retail sales data feed and ultimately a business decision, and what you do at each stage when no single system does it all. It walks through the problems, the process of evaluating solutions from manual entry to AI, and the framework used to make the call. You will come away seeing analytics delivery as a triage and sequencing problem, where the tools include not just technology but change management, process design, and human communication.