The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   One of our clients at Digital Mortar is a chain of gas/convenience stores measuring the full journey from pump to shop and back. What makes their use-case more compelling is that the stores are a significant upscale from your traditional gas convenience mart – with lots of more … Continue reading "Measuring Journeys from Outdoors to Indoors"

Measuring Journeys from Outdoors to Indoors

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel Although Digital Mortar isn’t really focused on loss prevention or security applications, there are two big reasons why it matters if you’re thinking about people-measurement. First, there are times when you can dual-purpose sensors to do both crowd-analytics and security (which greatly improves your hardware ROI). Second, when it … Continue reading "People Measurement Alerting for Security and Perimeter Monitoring"

People Measurement Alerting for Security and Perimeter Monitoring

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Customer Journey alerting can completely transform the experience of a physical space. Instead of waiting for a customer to seek out help, it actively looks for opportunities to use the available help most effectively. Common use cases include identifying customers who absolutely require assistance (unmanned support, locked cases, … Continue reading "Customer Journey Alerting with People-Measurement"

Customer Journey Alerting with People-Measurement

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   While performance may be the biggest challenge in building a people-measurement based alerting system, the most important problem for most businesses to solve is HOW to use people-measurement alerting. Use-cases tend to fall into one of these basic categories: operational management, customer journey, and security / loss-prevention. Of … Continue reading "The Operational Use-Cases for People-Measurement Alerting"

The Operational Use-Cases for People-Measurement Alerting

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   The visible part of an alerting system – the text alerts, webhooks and emails users get – is the easy part. The hard parts are building the realtime pipeline for store or location measurement, creating things like the predictive queue model, and keeping the underlying alerting engine performant … Continue reading "The Challenge of a Real-time People-Measurement Alerting System"

The Challenge of a Real-time People-Measurement Alerting System

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Productionizing a predictive queue measurement model really involves solving two problems. The first is integrating the predictive queue model into a real-time pipeline so that you can generate predictions about future line states based on current data. The second problem is deciding what to do about those predictions … Continue reading "Productionizing a Predictive Queue Management Model"

Productionizing a Predictive Queue Management Model

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel   Building a predictive queue management model is the penultimate and most interesting step in the process of building a queue management system. We used two different analytic techniques to tackle the problem: classic time-series and neural networks. The advantage of time series is that it is simple, easy … Continue reading "Building a Model for Predictive Queue Analytics"

Building a Model for Predictive Queue Analytics

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Probably the most important step in building a model is making sure you’ve got the right target variable. Usually that’s not too hard. But looking at our line data, we quickly realized that predicting line depth wasn’t going to work as straightforwardly as we thought. The problem is … Continue reading "Getting the Right Target Variable for Line Prediction"

Getting the Right Target Variable for Line Prediction

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   After the data wrangling comes the fun part of any analysis – building the actual model. That starts with model selection. For predictive queue management, we’re looking at time-series models. And because we have store traffic and occupancy data, it will be a multivariate model. In addition, it’s … Continue reading "Choosing a Model for Predictive Queue Management"

Choosing a Model for Predictive Queue Management

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   The hardest part of most analytics projects is the data wrangling – and so far that’s proven to be the case when it comes to building a predictive queue model to incorporate into our DM1 platform. I’m working with data from multiple clients and while the core data … Continue reading "Data Wrangling for Predictive Queue Analytics"

Data Wrangling for Predictive Queue Analytics

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   The hardest part of most analytics projects is getting and prepping the data. For predictive queue management, we’ll use an event level feed from Digital Mortar’s DM1 product. It gives us every piece of data we might want. The hard part, is deciding what we might actually want … Continue reading "Predictive Queue Management: Data Preparation for Analysis"

Predictive Queue Management: Data Preparation for Analysis

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   A recent article in CNN detailed the steady growth in self-checkout despite a litany of problems for both customers and stores. Is the trend truly driven, as the article suggests, by a fundamental misconception that self-checkout is faster? Whatever you think about self-checkout (I happen to like it), … Continue reading "Measuring Self-Checkout. Or not…"

Measuring Self-Checkout. Or not…

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   A customer’s time in line is one of the most important (and controllable) aspects of physical experience. We’re currently working through several queue management projects that will involve both active queue management (alerting when lines get long) and – even more interesting – predictive queue management (alerting when … Continue reading "Introduction to Predictive Queue Management"

Introduction to Predictive Queue Management

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Celebrating 50 years since their landmark study The Limits to Growth, the co-editors of a retrospective look back manage to seem as smug and wrong-headed as ever in this Wired interview:   https://www.wired.com/story/the-infamous-1972-report-that-warned-of-civilizations-collapse/   It’s awfully hard to model the world but a deep ignorance about economics and … Continue reading "On the Limits to Growth and the Limitless Hubris of Modelers"

On the Limits to Growth and the Limitless Hubris of Modelers

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Integrating Shopper Journey and Point-of-Sale (PoS) data at the store-section/time level delivers powerful analytics around true conversion rate, optimal STARs rate, section seasonality, out-of-stock impact and more. But what about integrating PoS at the individual level – so that specific baskets are attached to specific journeys?   More … Continue reading "The Analytics Power of Integrating Individual Shopper Journey and Point-of-Sale Data"

The Analytics Power of Integrating Individual Shopper Journey and Point-of-Sale Data

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   The value of a PoS integration to journey data is profound. And that value starts with one essential metric – the true conversion rate. Journey tells you how much traffic every area of your store got. How much of that traffic engaged. What it doesn’t tell you is … Continue reading "Key Analytics with Point-of-Sale (PoS) Data at the Store Section Level"

Key Analytics with Point-of-Sale (PoS) Data at the Store Section Level

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   The key to a successful integration of PoS data into Shopper Journey data isn’t usually the join itself – it’s having a good mapping of SKU to store. That mapping is essential even if you’re doing a join at the individual level, because it’s the only way to … Continue reading "Shopper Journey and PoS Integration : Mapping SKUs to the Store"

Shopper Journey and PoS Integration : Mapping SKUs to the Store

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Given that PoS data is a powerful addition to shopper journey data, the question becomes what level of PoS data integration is necessary or appropriate. The most powerful integration is also the most detailed – integrating purchase data into individual journeys. This kind of integration let’s you see … Continue reading "Choosing the Level of PoS Data to Integrate into Shopper Journeys"

Choosing the Level of PoS Data to Integrate into Shopper Journeys

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Yes, Point-of-Sale (PoS) data enables a host of really fundamental analytics opportunities in store journey measurement – from both the journey and the store perspective. It also helps ensure that key shopper journey metrics mean what you think they mean. But probably the most important role PoS data … Continue reading "Why PoS Data is a Fundamental Integration with Shopper Journey Data"

Why PoS Data is a Fundamental Integration with Shopper Journey Data

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   PoS is the motherlode of retail integrations with shopper journey data. It’s almost a must-have. But all integrations can be frightening – less for the technical challenges than for the analytic ones. When you start down the path of PoS integration with in-store customer behavioral data, you’ll want … Continue reading "Integrating PoS and Shopper Journey Data"

The Measurement Minute

The Measurement Minute

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