Every wholesaler/retailer has more dashboards than they did five years ago. Fewer of them have more confidence in the decisions those dashboards are meant to drive. If you’ve ever watched a markdown go out too late, a stock-out happen despite a system flagging it days in advance, or a promotion get picked apart in a post-mortem instead of adjusted while it still mattered — you already know the real bottleneck isn’t the reporting. It’s trust.

In this session, Janet McFarlane, Head of Data and Analytics at SPAR Group, unpacks why buyers, planners, logistics and store teams still lean on gut feel over the numbers in front of them, even inside systems that are well established — and why that gap rarely closes with more training or a better dashboard. Drawing on real experience building data and analytics functions across a large, multi-format retail group, she’ll walk through where trust breaks down, what actually rebuilds it, and how closing that trust gap is what finally turns insight into action.

Expect a practical, no-nonsense look at retail decision-making, grounded in real experience rather than theory or product pitches. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of where their own organisation’s insight-to-action gap is hiding, what’s really driving it, and a handful of concrete moves for building a decision culture where the data gets trusted enough to be used.

If you’ve ever sat in a trading meeting and watched good data lose to a strong opinion, this session is for you.

Learning 1: Why the gap between insight and action is usually a trust problem, not a data or reporting problem — and how to tell the difference in your own organisation.

Learning 2: What actually builds trust in a number (and what quietly destroys it)

Learning 3: How to turn a trusted number into a decision with a clear owner and deadline — practical moves for closing the “last mile” between knowing and doing.