Nike Inc. has acquired Celect, a predictive analytics firm founded by MIT professors, to accelerate its ability to match inventories to consumer needs.
Celect’s cloud-based analytics platform allows retailers to optimize inventory across an omnichannel environment through hyper-local demand predictions. Celect’s team will be integrated into Nike’s operations. Its co-founders will continue as tenured professors at MIT, consulting Nike on an ongoing basis.
“As demand for our product grows, we must be insight-driven, data optimized and hyper-focused on consumer behavior,” said Eric Sprunk, Nike’s COO, in a statement. “This is how we serve consumers more personally at scale.”
In a column for Retail Touchpoints from July, Andrea Morgan-Vandome, Celect’s chief marketing officer, wrote that advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning now provide retailers with a more accurate view of demand across channels to choose the best fulfillment strategy based on product availability, likely demand, capacity constraints, shipping costs, delivery timing and other factors.
Source: Nike to marry predictive analytics and RFID to optimize inventory performance – RetailWire