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Is Reopening Worth It? This Software Can Tell You

, by Davide Ripamonti
From a project born out of the SDA Bocconi Channel Retail Lab comes a useful digital tool for merchants who have just reopened their businesses. They now have the intelligence they need to decide about their future

An idea born almost as a joke that, once perfected, was so well received that it even crossed the ocean. This kind of fact testifies to the anxiety and concern with which the retail world has experienced closure before and is now experiencing the delicate phase of reopening. The object of desire in question is called Fase2.today and is a completely free software created as part of the Channel & Retail Management Lab of SDA Bocconi School of Management directed by Sandro Castaldo, which allows retailers to calculate in a few seconds how restrictive measures will affect turnover.

"At the beginning I didn't even think about its real-world use", explains Vitaliano Fiorillo, Lecturer of Operations and Technology at SDA Bocconi, "then the idea was successful and we asked BuildNN, a startup specialized in data analysis of commercial activities, to develop it. It is our contribution in this Covid crisis because merchants want to understand whether, when limiting access as required by law, they will be able to cover operating costs. And with our software it is possible to collect data and information to make informed decisions". The tool is so effective that it has been adopted by Confcommercio for its members. But not only: "We have been contacted by the municipality of Buenos Aires, which includes not only the city but also the whole province," say Fiorillo, "because they are looking for a solution to guarantee the tranquility of the local shopkeepers, hard hit and now on a war footing. They are already using our software, but to spread it even further they asked us to make a Spanish version of it."

According to Vincenzo Marino, a graduate of Bocconi CLEAM and SDA Bocconi EMIT, and co-founder with another Bocconi student Giacomo Barone and with Enrico La Sala of BuildNN, "the software will allow us to understand how customer management and data analysis can make a huge impact even for a small shop. After all, it is only a matter of answering 20 simple questions."

As Marino, who is also an instructor at SDA Bocconi School of Management, explains, this is an absolutely philanthropic project and it will not stop here: "In a few weeks we will be able to provide additional software features to perform increasingly accurate simulations. With or, hopefully, without Covid.."

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