Snowflake and AWS partner to aid retail businesses

Snowflake, the data cloud company, has extended its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), to improve demand forecasting and delivery for the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries.

According to the company, this latest development will offer customers the ability to receive Amazon purchase order (PO) data and leverage product demand forecast data generated by Amazon Forecast within Snowflake's Retail Data Cloud.

Retail and CPG businesses that sell on Amazon.com need to accurately forecast and anticipate variances of demand for their products, while also planning for manufacturing and delivery lead times to Amazon fulfilment centres, the company states.

Snowflake's Retail Data Cloud, which unites Snowflake's data platform, Snowflake and partner delivered solutions, and industry-specific datasets, breaks down data silos across the retail industry.

With this announcement, retail brands and CPGs that sell on Amazon will now be able to receive their Amazon PO data natively in Snowflake, leverage brand-level and fulfilment centre-level forecasts, and access new data from third-party data providers within the Retail Data Cloud, all on Snowflake's single, integrated platform, the company states.

The AWS and Snowflake relationship is intended to empower retail businesses to process, analyse, act on and syndicate data from a multitude of sources without the delays of traditional methods which require copying and moving data, the company states.

The Snowflake and AWS offering aims to enable retail and CPG customers to:

• Import Amazon purchase order data: More easily import Amazon PO data into Snowflake to better access, govern and share data across the organisation.
• Increase forecast accuracy: Improve forecast accuracy using machine learning models from Amazon Forecast to create accurate time-series forecasts to predict demand for variable vendor purchase orders weeks ahead of time.
• Track product change impacts: Track product weight or dimension changes to ensure they adhere to manufacturer standards.
• Reduce OTIF penalties: Improve on-time in-full (OTIF) metrics to enhance organic ranking on Amazon.com, reduce chargeback expenses, and help ensure products are in-stock for consumers to buy.
• Ensure high velocity SKUs in stock: Match correct probabilistic forecasts with SKU sales velocity to help ensure key products will stay in stock and improve revenue.

Snowflake global head of retail and CPG Rosemary Hua says, "Today's retail and CPG businesses are looking for accurate, efficient, and timely technology solutions to help deliver on their promises to consumers and positively impact their bottom lines.

"Amazon.com has revolutionised how retail and CPG businesses sell and deliver to consumers and, similarly, Snowflake has had a profound impact on empowering businesses to optimise their operations and seamlessly collaborate on data. Together, Snowflake and AWS can streamline data-driven inventory management for items sold on Amazon.

Snowflake enables users to mobilise their data with Snowflake's Data Cloud. Customers use the Data Cloud to unite siloed data, discover and securely share data, and execute diverse analytic workloads.