Multi-formats: As retailers grow big and consumers' expectation change, they will have to come up with different formats offering different value preposition to consumers. Managing of stores across formats, cities, regions and even countries through a single merchandising office can be a daunting task without requisite IT infrastructure to facilitate the flow of information between stores, warehouses and the central merchandising office.

Customer Engagement: With increasing options in terms of formats and increased penetration of the stores, customers will always have the option to select from many stores. Retailers will have to devise multiple ways of retaining their customers by bringing in events, loyalty programs, and better customer servicing through deeper understanding of consumers' preferences.

Multi-channel Retail: On the lines of international models, there is an evolving model of Click and Bricks, wherein brick and mortar retailers are strengthening their presence through supporting channels like Web stores for reaching out to new customers as well as servicing of existing customers. All these other supporting channels like Web, catalog or Kiosk rely heavily on technology for execution.

Store Experience: Apart from basic store process automation, the technology can be deployed for better consumer experience in the store. For instance, information kiosks within the store for comparing between different models of technology products can be a big differentiator for consumers to shop from a particular store.

Similarly, even simpler technology initiatives can make consumers' in-store shopping experience more meaningful.

Retail Applications
With large corporate houses entering the retail sector and the consequent entry of IT professionals from other industry verticals, awareness levels of IT managers in the retail industry have grown. There is still a need to display the benefits that accrue from implementing ERP and CRM applications in a retail organization.

Oracle Retail is spending considerable time and effort to create awareness about the availability of IT applications and the consequent benefits to retail organizations. Sun Microsystems has recently unveiled its solutions for the retail industry, called JAVA Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS). Java CAPS provides a comprehensive integration platform to build and manage SOA-based composite applications that enhance, aggregate, and leverage the customer data within them, enabling companies to achieve a single customer view.

Though there are a whole lot of applications to help the retail business, CIOs of retail houses feel that there should be a proper communication between retailers and solution providers. Says Chinar Deshpande, former CIO of Pantaloons, "Solutions are available, but there should be a proper dialog between product, IT, and business groups." RK Singh, CEO of Influx group says, "Many a times we use IT and feel that the expenditure incurred is too high if we compare it with the value of its benefits." In similar tone, Arun Gupta, CIO, Shoppers Stop, puts it this way: "Our problems are in rupees, but the solutions are in dollars." In Shoppers Stop, they have completely revived their IT system twice in last ten years.

CIOs of retail industries are aware of the need of ERP and CRM applications. As businesses grow, they feel the need for a flexible IT infrastructure to run their business more effectively. They have started to realize that IT is a fundamental aspect of a responsive business, and that this is possible only when their core ERP and CRM applications start to communicate in real-time and receive data as soon as it is captured. This, in turn, is possible only if they implement a service-based infrastructure. "Using service-oriented process integration, a single-view composite application can access customer data held in customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), financial, and legacy applications," says Priyadarshi Mohapatra, general manager, Retail Practice, Sun Microsystems.

RFID as Savior
In a retail store, RFID assists in inventory management. All items in a retail outlet sport read-only tags that contain the product code and its description, including the batch number, expiry date and price. The shelves, exit gates, and warehouses are fitted with sensors that read the information from the RFID tag and help in updating the inventory system in real-time. This way it helps in total asset visibility and tracks the inventory stocking. It also ensures better process control for products in the store. In warehouses and container depots, containers are marked with RFID chips that contain details of origin, destination, and other details. Entry and exit gates, vehicles, and cranes are fitted with an antenna that senses the RFID tags, and records and updates the system to check for any deviation in the schedule. With precise tracking of the location of pallets and containers within the warehouse, it is easy to pinpoint unscheduled movements. The system also considerably helps reduce costs and time for check-in and check-out.

There was only one issue with RFID technology-it was unable to work on vessels holding liquids or made of metal. Now Wal-Mart's tech team and its vendors have overcome this problem, inviting major deployments. In India Globus, Pantaloons, and Madura Garments have already Started testing RFID.

Page(s)   1  2  3