How can AI and data-driven intelligence build on your success?
Driving Higher ROI with PaladinNsight™, FastQuery and PaladinShop™
Retail has always been about your “edge”: The collection of unique competitive advantages that make your store not only profitable and self-sustaining, but an indispensable part of your community. You strive for an edge in your hiring and training practices, your inventory management strategy, and your reputation for customer service.
More and more, modern retailers are turning to AI products for their edge. The promise of quick research, easy content generation, and an ability to act confidently based on mountains of business data without weeks or months of planning may be new, but the end goal is the same as ever. Store operators and staff spend less time on repetitive or complicated back-office tasks, and more time in the aisles delivering the best customer experiences possible.
Paladin Data Corporation® is here to help with that, just like we have been since 1980. We know proactive retailers are ready for more automation and other advanced technology in their stores, and we stand ready and eager to provide them. At the same time, we know what it means to expose your store’s precious financial and customer data to any outside company or agent. Every project we undertake prioritizes minimizing those exposures and preventing data breaches.
As a Paladin subscriber, you can benefit from AI and other advanced retail tech in your store today without putting blind faith in untested technologies. Read on to learn how.
How does Paladin use AI and business data?
Paladin POS helps automate inventory management and improve profitability with proprietary analytical algorithms, reporting and purchase order generation tools in PaladinNsight™ and our Suggested Order report; AI-assisted tools for generating rich product descriptions and product photos in our PaladinShop™ e-commerce solution; and the optional plain-language AI assistant integration from FastQuery that answers questions about inventory and operations based on your store’s Paladin database.
Like every Paladin feature, tool and software integration, our automated and AI-assisted offerings (and associated third-party vendors, when applicable) are carefully analyzed and tested internally before we release them to subscribers, so you can rest assured they meet our highest standards for not only quality, but cybersecurity as well.
PaladinNsight and Suggested Order reports
The PaladinNsight dashboard is the powerful front end of the Market-Driven Inventory Management system built into Paladin POS. Housed in the Inventory module and comprised of four dial meters reminiscent of the gauges in an automotive or aviation instrument cluster, it provides powerful insight at a glance into your inventory workflows and investments, generating actionable reports based on unreviewed inventory, loss/shrinkage, stagnant/slow/overstocked inventory, stockouts and obsolete SKUs. Beyond the quick readouts from the meters themselves, each of the four features a sortable data Viewer or Reviewer. Some add a Detail view for more granular information (when needed), and each offers an option to export the associated data to an Excel report for maximum flexibility.
First from the left and operating on the principle of “If we don’t have it, we can’t sell it,” the Lost Opportunity meter helps stores maximize their investments in inventory by making it easy to locate out-of-stock items. The meter itself shows the total financial impact of stockouts over the next four weeks if no action is taken. Clicking the magnifying glass icon opens the Viewer, which displays a list of your store’s out-of-stock items along with other vital information like annual sales quantity and weeks out of stock. By default, the Viewer sorts affected items by their expected impact on revenue, with the biggest impacts at the top. The list can be re-sorted by clicking any column header and, like the data table feeding each PaladinNsight meter, exported to Excel at any time for further processing or analysis.
The Investment Review meter displays the overall percentage of your store’s live inventory that has not been reviewed within 180 days. The Reviewer shows unreviewed inventory grouped together by location or department, and the Details view drills down to the individual item level. For stores who follow the best practice of keeping stock on hand figures up to date throughout the year with regular cycle counting, the Investment Review meter offers a way to instantly see which items, departments, or locations need a fresh count and a proactive look at their pricing, labeling, and display strategies.
The Loss Experience meter tracks investment dollars lost when items go missing from your inventory due to incorrect stock counts, theft, breakage, misplaced inventory, and so on. The meter shows the total investment impact in dollars from items affected by loss in the last 30 days. Clicking the magnifying glass under the Loss Experience meter opens the tool’s Viewer, where you can sort values in any column and investigate the source of losses by department, location, supplier, date range, and the severity of the loss in terms of monetary value or number of lost stock units. Clicking the magnifying glass on any line in the Viewer opens Details, where you can see the specifics of individual items in each loss-affected category. Patterns in how, when, where and which items go missing inform changes in your store’s practices that can reduce future losses, keeping more of your inventory investment dollars working for you.
Finally, the Non-performing Assets meter displays the total dollars invested in inventory with no return (in other words, inventory that is sitting in your store, but not selling). The meter’s Viewer can sort the data by department or location, wasted investment dollars, overstock quantities, number of stocking days, supplier, or column headers, and the Details view shows you the individual items in affected departments and locations. All of these options empower you to quickly prioritize which SKUs need clearance pricing, bundling with more popular products, or other solutions, so you can free up the money and space they have tied up and make way for better-selling items.
The Suggested Order report, meanwhile, automatically converts all of the magical Market-Driven Inventory Management data that feeds the PaladinNsight dashboard into a proposed purchase order based on analyzed sales history and item-level settings in the Inventory module. After review, the report can be converted into a pending purchase order and transmitted to your supplier on demand. Suggested Order takes guesswork and deep manual research out of ordering: Many Paladin customers find the proprietary algorithms driving the system are so good they routinely contribute almost no manual input to the ordering process.
FastQuery
Paladin partner developer FastQuery takes the common AI design concept of “answer engine” or “assistant” and localizes it to POS systems like Paladin, where their product integrates with the store’s database to become an expert advisor in plain language inventory and store process questions.
Just like the products and features we develop internally, Paladin’s integration with FastQuery is built to keep your store’s data safe. Data is exchanged between the Paladin database and the FastQuery tool, but not shared to train external AI models or altered without your input.
FastQuery gives Paladin users a way to leverage the pattern recognition and information processing advantages of AI-informed work while letting you maintain control of your store’s data and make your own decisions about what to do. Combined with PaladinNsight and the Suggested Order report, FastQuery offers almost endless possibilities for optimizing inventory, margins, and operations in general.
PaladinShop
PaladinShop is another way Paladin uses AI tools to reduce manual work for your store while optimizing impact and value.
PaladinShop offers each Paladin POS customer a branded website for customer self-service and/or online sales. PaladinShop sites are managed within Paladin POS, with no separate platform to learn or manage. Some Paladin stores elect to limit their PaladinShop website to the customer portal function, offering customers with house accounts a way to view paperless invoices and statements and make payments without ever setting foot in the store. Other implementations add public access to informative product listings and stock on hand data, while others implement a live digital store that fully enables online sales.
AI assistance in PaladinShop is limited to the automatic sourcing and retrieval of rich product descriptions and images – invisible automation which nonetheless significantly cuts the manual effort required for traditional e-commerce website building and helps keep the costs of using PaladinShop very low (well below most other e-commerce solutions on the market) .
Upshot
Paladin makes building on your store’s success with modern analytical, agentic and other automated technologies easy and worry-free. We’re an employee-owned company with a steady focus on longevity and stability. We understand and appreciate that your store’s operations are driven primarily by the talents and wisdom of humans, not AI, and we don’t dive headlong into risky radical technological changes to quench shareholders’ thirst for quick profits. We consider, test, build and refine new features carefully to minimize risk and maximize positive impacts on your store. Stick with us for continuous, responsible innovation that keeps you in control and keeps your data safe.
Any questions about Paladin’s automated tools and integrations? Support from Paladin’s renowned US-based team is included for all Paladin subscribers and available 5am-5:30pm Monday-Friday, plus 24/7 emergency support.
