Retail and distribution · UAE and KSA
Retail data, finally in one picture.
A free data maturity assessment for retail and distribution companies in the UAE and KSA. Three weeks, one report, a clear next step.
Who this is for
Regional chains and distributors that have outgrown their spreadsheets
Not the largest groups with global consultants on retainer. The companies in between: enough data to matter, not enough order to use it.
- Grocery, pharmacy, non-food and specialty retail, FMCG distribution, e-commerce and delivery, local consumer brands
- 200 to 2,000 people, several formats or sales channels
- A loyalty programme or CRM already in place
- Data spread across ERP, POS, loyalty, e-commerce, replenishment and spreadsheets
- A CEO, CFO or commercial director who needs one picture before the next pricing, assortment or AI decision
What we see in regional chains
Six places where retail data quietly stops working
Every chain is different. These are the patterns we check first, not a menu of products.
One customer, three systems
Loyalty, POS and online each know a different version of the same shopper, and the promo report still gets assembled by hand.
Product cards that cannot be compared
Attributes differ by brand and category, so neither your category team nor a shopping agent can compare two products on what matters.
Mix is the lever you actually control
For most regional chains purchase and shelf prices move within narrow limits. Category margin lives in the brand mix, and that decision needs data nobody has in one place.
Pricing rules nobody can list
Dozens of rules written over years, some contradicting each other, with no view of which ones actually fire.
Reports nobody opens
BI was rolled out, decisions are still made in spreadsheets. We measure which reports are used, which duplicate each other, and what the unused ones were missing.
Stock you cannot trust
Replenishment runs on balances that disagree between systems, so stock-outs and overstock happen at the same time.
Recognise two or three of these? That is usually enough for the assessment to pay for itself in the first month.
How the assessment works
Three weeks, on your data, with your people
Interviews and the systems map
Commercial, category management, marketing, IT and finance. We map ERP, POS, loyalty, e-commerce, replenishment and BI, and how data actually moves between them.
Checks on real data
Does the customer and the product reconcile across systems. How complete are product attributes. Can stock balances be trusted. Which reports and mailings are actually used.
Findings and a next step
Maturity score on our matrix, five to seven prioritised findings, quick wins for the next weeks, inexpensive steps, and a fixed-price pilot proposal with a measurable result.
You get a 15 to 20 page report and a working session with your leadership. No obligation to continue.
What comes next
A pilot in 6 to 8 weeks, then one management picture
One domain, one measurable result, criteria agreed before we start, fixed price. Then the scattered ERP, CRM and spreadsheet data becomes a single management picture your team and your AI tools read the same way.
- Pilot on one domain: customer, product, pricing, stock or reporting
- Fixed scope, fixed price, 6 to 8 weeks
- You own the code, the rules and the documentation
- Any stack: Microsoft, Google, AWS or open source, on your side of the fence
Why SoDa
People who speak category, pricing and loyalty
Fifteen years of data work for retailers and consumer goods companies, from DIY chains and grocery hypermarkets to fashion, pharmacy and online. Daily operations reporting for hundreds of users, demand forecasting by SKU and store, loyalty and customer intelligence, warehouses that process billions of receipt lines. A Dubai-based team, vendor-agnostic, fixed scope and price.
What we have done in retail
Grocery chain, 230 hypermarkets and 95 supermarkets
Analytical reporting for all commercial operations: commercial P&L, sales, supplier SLAs, availability and stock, staff efficiency. Daily dashboards for 500+ users on top of daily transactions. A promo demand forecasting service by SKU and store: forecast accuracy up 13 points, a forecast in 10 seconds.
International DIY retailer, 46 stores
Data partner in a data platform modernisation programme: process analysis, RFI and RFP support, DWH and BI for procurement, warehouse and finance. A daily data mart on sales and stock from every angle, KPI calculation automated, 80% KPI coverage. Five years together.
Premium supermarket chain, 110+ stores and online
A new reporting tool for receipt-level data: a warehouse that takes everything from the ERP, inventory calculated on 4.5 billion lines, dashboards for marketing, purchasing and top management.
Fashion retailer, 560+ stores in 6 countries
Corporate reporting taken out of the ERP into BI: data from 10 business units consolidated, a reporting tree with analysis scenarios per user task, sales, purchasing, stock, finance, HR, logistics and lease in one place.
Regional supermarket chain
Dashboards for marketing on the structure of the customer base, loyalty cards and category sales, on top of an on-shelf availability service.
Grocery chain, customer intelligence
Loyalty programme turned into a churn and promo tool: customer segmentation, price elasticity, substitute and companion goods, churn forecasting and anti-churn offers.
Clients are named at the meeting. All projects delivered by the current team.
Want to see how one of these was done for a chain like yours? Ask for a 30-minute walkthrough.
A little further out
When your customers' agents start shopping, assortment management changes
Shopping assistants will soon compare products across chains on composition, origin, reviews and price, and place orders without a human opening an app. An agent does not walk the aisle and does not see the display. It reads attributes. That changes what assortment management is.
- Attributes become the product. Taste, colour, pack size, origin, sugar content, pit or no pit: today many of these are not maintained at all, or maintained differently by brand and category. For an agent they are the only thing that exists.
- Comparability beats rich content. Beautiful brand pages do not help if two products cannot be compared on the same parameters. A single product data model across brands does.
- Mix decisions need new data. When an agent picks the product that matches the request, the chain competes on what it carries and how well it is described, not on shelf position. The brand mix inside a category becomes a data decision.
- Your systems have to answer machines. Catalogue, availability and price exposed in a way agents can read, connected to the same internal systems your category team uses.
This is the same data work as everything above, started earlier. The assessment includes a readiness check for agent-driven demand.
Request the assessment
A few details and we take it from here
We reply within one working day with a 30-minute call to agree the scope. The assessment itself is free for regional chains and distributors in the UAE and KSA.
Leave your contacts and a retail data specialist will reply within one working day.
Request the assessmentNo deck, no sales call: the first conversation is with a retail data specialist.
Who you will work with
A Dubai-based team of data engineers, business analysts and retail specialists. The first call is with a retail data specialist, not a salesperson, and the assessment is run by the same people who would deliver the pilot.
Sound of Data FZCO, Dubai Silicon Oasis · info@s-o-d-a.com · s-o-d-a.com