How do you back up annual gains like this in the face of ever more brutal competition? The answer is data. Here are five examples of retailers leveraging demographic, geographic, purchase, position and other data to identify customers, increase marketing efficiency and reach, forecast trends, grow loyalty and drive sales.

Automating back-office business processes saves retailer more than 20,000 hours in a few months. A big-box retail chain wants to continue its digital transformation journey by automating finance and accounting tasks enabling individual team members to be more efficient with data. The company worked with PwC and Alteryx to identify manual processes, map workflows and build automation to optimize them.

New data solution creates “one source of truth.” IJSVOGEL Retail serves the Netherlands and Belgium with several brands selling pet supplies, garden supplies and outdoor life products. The company worked with Fivetran to establish a unified way of managing business data and improve data quality.

Longtime player builds data pipeline in 3 minutes vs. 3 days. With a nearly 200-year history in the beauty market, German seller Douglas had a very rapidly growing data volume adding daily to huge amounts of historical data. The company partnered with Dremio to optimize the creation of data pipelines so data could get to the employees who need it.

How retailers are applying customer data to improve UX, sales and monetization opportunities. This report from Deloitte gives an overview of how retailers successfully managing the shift to digital are using online customer data to enhance core retail activities.

Grocers can fuel growth with advanced analytics. McKinsey examines how advanced analytics, including artificial intelligence, can provide retailers—specifically those in the grocery industry—with an incremental increase in earnings of up to two percentage points.