An Intelligent Decision Support (IDS) Platform for the Digital Economy: A Novel Approach to Supporting Sales Strategies in the Textile and Apparel Industry

Ids
Quick and reliable provision of social media business analytics has become indispensable for (1) monitoring and maintaining textile and apparel industry brand in all popular sources of social media, (2) identifying “hot” and “bestselling” products in the digital economy, (3) reviewing branding effect in the digital world after the launch of a marketing campaign, and (4) optimizing the sales strategy. In this project, we propose to design and develop an "Intelligent Decision Support (IDS) Platform" using AI and NLP technologies. The proposed system is designed to gather two types of data: real-time consumers’ feedback from news websites, blogs, business-to-customer (B2C) platforms, and forums; and real-time product/raw material stock level, manufacturing lead time, and point-of-sale (POS) information.
Application

The IDS platform helps the user to execute intelligent and comprehensive data analysis by providing automatic access to social media platforms to capture content daily. The IDS platform saves users’ time by handling repetitive work e.g. providing regular business intelligence reports. The platform can also:

• determine the levels of emotions (negative, neutral, and positive) expressed toward a brand in the collected content;
• identify the people, places, and organisations deemed to be closely associated with the brand;
• group similar topics together and assign a header to each topic group; and
• classify the captured data according to media type and data source.
Industry Benefit

Hearing the voices in social media helps brands understand their customers, competitors, and market trends. The IDS platform helps marketers to extract, analyse and manage data from different social media platforms in a systematic and useful way.
Technological Breakthrough

The IDS platform utilises The Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine and web-crawler technology to provide relevant, structured and classified content which can be used to identify marketing issues and needs promptly.
Project Name (ITF)
Intelligent Decision Support Platform for a Digital Economy: A Novel Approach to Support Sales Strategy in Textile and Apparel Industry
Project Number (ITF)
ITP/030/13TP