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"Retail Anywhere understands the importance and complexities involved
in creating, deploying and supporting
technology solutions to meet the needs of individual
retail customers."
Source : Retail Anywhere
New Possibilities In Retail Technologies for Small to Mid-Size Retailers: Leveraging Total Retail Solutions Based on Collective Retail Intelligence
Retail Intelligence is also known as :
Retail Intelligence Group,
Using Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Solutions,
Active Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Advisors,
Retail Intelligence Briefing,
Global Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Network,
Products Retail Retail,
Leading Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Information,
Retail Business Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Suite,
Retail Intelligence System,
Buy Retail Intelligence,
Quick Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Shop,
Collective Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Services,
Advanced Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Monitor,
Web-based Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Tool,
Analytical Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Architecture,
Retail Intelligence Reviews,
Retail Intelligence Briefings,
Delivering Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Tour,
Real Time Retail Intelligence,
Consumer Retail Intelligence,
Executive Retail Intelligence,
Complete Retail Intelligence,
Retail Intelligence Infrastructure,
Retail Intelligence Applications,
Retail Intelligence Market,
Retail Intelligence Success,
Expands Retail Intelligence.
Executive Summary
Consumers are simultaneously empowered and
overwhelmed by an unprecedented amount of
choice, and most retailers can no longer compete
on price alone to reach them. Acquiring and
retaining customers means continuously learning
what they want and continuously improving
your delivery of it in a way they enjoy. Powerful
technology can be a means towards that end. And
it can be a means for most retailers now that
technology providers are capitalizing on collective
retail intelligence to offer integrated retail
solutions for small and mid-size retailers as well
as large ones. Solutions built upon Microsoft SQL,
and to the OPOS and ARTS Data Model standards,
fit now and will fit into the future as a retailer
grows on its own individual path.
Introduction
Supermarkets were to retailers of the 1950s as big
box stores are to retailers of the present - brutal
pressure from market leaders is nothing new.
That said, today's rate of change and degree of
consumer empowerment truly can be called
extreme with technology and globalization having
radically
transformed
our ideas
of what
commerce
can look like. Now there's an oversupply of
everything available...except customers. Just
a few years ago, companies with the biggest IT
budgets were best able to continuously capture
information and capitalize on new possibilities.
This competitive advantage is eroding as some retail technology providers and The Association
for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) act to
make solutions more accessible to small and
mid-size retailers.
The early 2000s saw most retailers focusing on
internal cost-cutting and on meeting existing
consumer demand in light of a nervous post-9/11
retail economy. With weakened and unpredictable
cash flow, it became crucial for them to maximize
their use of older technology before taking steps
to upgrade it. Earlier release POS systems were
very much a focus, as their rudimentary inventory
management capabilities were a helpful piece of
controlling costs.
Now into the last half of the 2000s, the retail
climate has become a bit healthier, if still fraught
with unknowns, and retailers are cautiously
looking towards growth again. Growth requires
continuous improvement, whether it's offering
new capabilities, entering new markets, or some
combination of the two. It follows that yesterday's
systems no longer support retailers as well as they
could, because they just don't have broad enough
functionality to support continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement is necessary - with the
proliferation of big discounters and of "category
killer" stores, there's so much choice available
to consumers that only the biggest retailers can
compete on price alone. If retailers can't compete
just on price, they must compete on value,
identifying and solving customer problems, and
giving people an enjoyable shopping experience.
Though traditionally an industry that spends far
less on IT infrastructure than other industries, retail is coming to see that infrastructure can
help to continuously determine and deliver what
customers want. It will cost them some money
now, but it could cost them their very existence if
they wait indefinitely to make the investment.
Retailers are not IT professionals, nor should they
have to be. Often the solutions they're using today
are either older proprietary systems that take lots
of care and customization (at a price) to keep
performing, or they're isolated bits of solutions
that don't
connect to
one another
and further
the use of
reporting and other analytical tools. Stores within
the same chain may not be operating on the same
technology standard, making maintenance and
information sharing chaotic at the corporate
level. And stores from chains that have merged or
acquired one another have a whole other level of
technological and political/cultural/procedural
complexity to navigate.
Even when their existing systems aren't working
optimally, though, retailers can be wary of
transitioning to something new, because they
can't afford the lost sales and lost productivity
that come with computer downtime and a steep
learning curve. Changes in technology are changes
in company culture, and sometimes employees
resist. To make transitions smooth, technology
needs to be easy to use and easy to integrate.
Building Upon Collective
Retail Intelligence
Retail technology providers can best serve
businesses by offering flexible and open solutions
that integrate backwards and also guide retailers
towards industry data standards for ease of
growth and integration going forwards. Microsoft
SQL Server platform is best able to support
retailers of all sizes. More precisely, it's best able to support volumes of data that are all sizes, for the
size of a retailer isn't necessarily proportional to
the volume of data it chooses to manage and store.
This truth will become increasingly pronounced
going forward, because pre-transactional data
from technology such as sensing equipment
increases the amount of data generated by a
factor of 10 to 100. A retailer may not plan to add
new locations and increase its data load in that
way, but it may eventually choose to adopt a new
technology that radically expands its data and
storage capacity needs beyond what it presently
forecasts. Microsoft SQL addresses this need for
quick adaptability by keeping upfront costs low,
and scaling for growth as a customer needs it.
This ease of getting started does not mean that a
retailer is compromising on the level of reliability
and security required in their computing
environment, only that powerful technology is
much more accessible to retailers than it once was.
The Microsoft SQL platform has advantages for
retailers by virtue of being a Microsoft product.
Microsoft Office is already in many retailers'
business offices, and SQL will easily integrate into
that environment so that employees can continue
to use legacy tools they've created in Excel, for
instance. The platform is also a good investment
into the future because it's been created by a
market leader. Solution providers have it in
their best interests to introduce compelling
new products that run on Microsoft, because
it's everywhere. At the same time, Microsoft
recognizes that some of these compelling new
products for retailers may include data that
comes in the form of sights and sounds, not
words and numbers, so it works to keep its
platform current with developments beyond the
relational database model.
Retail technology providers can demonstrate
their commitment to flexibility by developing
solutions to work with the OPOS device standard.
OPOS, which stands for both OLE point of sale and open point of sale, is the first widely adopted
POS standard. It was initiated by Microsoft, NCR,
Epson, and Fujitsu-ICL over 10 years ago, because
each company had been introducing peripherals
without attention to compatibility with others'
products, creating chaos and frustration for
retailers. Businesses are best served by having the
choice to pick and choose the elements of their
individual solutions from different manufacturers,
and with OPOS, they can. This means that if a
company buys an OPOS printer now, this printer
will go with OPOS signature capture equipment
it may decide to buy in the future, potentially
maximizing the life of a retailer's equipment
investment.
Providers can also incorporate the ARTS Data
Model as a standard. ARTS is an international
membership organization dedicated to reducing
the costs of technology through standards. It's the
technical wing of the National Retail Federation
(NRF), which is the world's largest retail trade
organization. The Data Model, currently in release
4.01, is a comprehensive relational database
design containing more than 4,000 fully defined
data elements within more than 600 tables. First
released in 1995, the model evolves by means of
a committee comprised of representatives from
leading retailers and vendors. Because the NRF
has an incredibly broad cross-section of retailers
within its membership, ARTS can aggregate the
knowledge
and bestpractices
of these
retailers into
its model. This means that even the smallest
business without IT staff can reap the benefits of
a data model that "the big guys" with all of their
resources helped to advise.
Buying into the ARTS standard allows businesses
to quickly adopt the new and great retailing ideas that come along without being held hostage by
the system they've already invested in. ARTS, and
technology providers who are certified ARTS
conformant, understand that retailers need to
tailor their infrastructure to best serve them in the
present while having the choice to adapt quickly
to market forces and improved technology that
they can't specifically foresee right now. Leaving
the door open to possibilities is the best way to be
agile enough to seize them and to stay competitive,
and the right technology can help to open a path.
Enabling Retailers to Make
Connections Through Integration
An integrated total retail solution can enable most
companies to follow the practices that market
leaders do. These effective practices have a lot to
do with making connections, be it connections
between aspects of an operation or connections
between customers and the retailer. Without the
ability to seamlessly follow - and then seamlessly
improve - what's going on throughout the
operation, all sorts of connections can be missed.
For instance, shrinkage is more likely to happen
when inventory moves around without being
absolutely accounted for at all times. A store may
know how many of something it's sold from its
POS system, but if it can't quickly compare that
total against how many it received, it can't be
certain how many should be in stock. Knowing
this information in real time helps to prevent loss
and keep supply and demand more closely in
balance, ultimately increasing profitability.
New POS systems are more like pared down
ERP systems than cash registers in that they can
track employees' hours and sales, transactions
by customer, loss management, and loyalty
programs, as well as rapidly processing sales,
updating inventory numbers, and interfacing
to other applications. Even with all of that
functionality, it's unlikely that a POS system can take the information coming from one or many
points of service and compile it into a format that
can be used for whatever insights it may provide.
This integration is why an enterprise solution can
make sense for even a small business that wants to
automate the management of inventory from the
time it's forecasted to the time it's sold, especially
if it has plans to grow.
The inventory management benefits of an
enterprise solution become especially clear when
a company has multiple stores and/or multiple
channels (web, catalog, and storefront) because
merchandise can be viewed across the entire
enterprise. This added efficiency is most crucial
if a business sells a thin-margin commodity that
competitors carry for the same or even a lower
price. For a simple example, say that a small
shoe store chain sets up its enterprise system to
send a store manager an automated alert when a
popular shoe style is running low in some sizes.
Without having to physically take inventory to
make this determination, she can arrange to have
stock transferred from another store where the
system shows it's not doing as well. Such a routine
automated alert can have real benefits:
Such a routine automated
alert can have real benefits:
- Customers' expectations are met
- Potential lost sales to competitors
are prevented
- More inventory sells at full price
- Demand forecasting becomes
more accurate
- Employees are empowered to be
effective in their jobs
For reasons evident in just this mundane example,
a level of enterprise functionality is vital to
retailers today. A small business is dealing with the
same basic retail procedures and challenges as a
huge one. Inventory management, merchandise
flow management, item and price maintenance,
ordering, and work force management are
universal aspects of running a retail business. A
smaller company may, in fact, have less room for
error than those with deeper pockets, meaning
that the ability to make good, timely decisions
furthered by good, timely information is
absolutely relevant.
Beyond inventory management, enterprise
systems provide the opportunity for in-depth
customer relationship management. With all
retailers needing to embrace an increasingly
customer-centric view in order to differentiate
their offerings, the ability to not only track but
to analyze customer patterns and preferences is
vital to making good decisions. Further, it's very
risky for all knowledge of customers to reside
with employees, for when they leave, there must
be a way to maintain customer goodwill with the
business. While technology will never substitute
for good person-to-person relationships with
customers, it's also true that meaningful personal
interactions in commerce are already increasingly
rare in our time-deprived society. Technology
that helps employees to more quickly develop
a familiarity with a customer's particular
preferences and sales history at minimum help to
show the customer that the company recognizes
him, wants to serve his needs, and values his
business over time. The same holds true for
loyalty programs and other forms of tracking
that recognize and reward the customer whether
he's shopping online, by catalog, or in one of a
company's stores. Marketing ROI, once an area of
vague speculation, starts to become more concrete
as customer actions can be measured after being
captured at the point of service.
When a company is working with high volumes
of inventory movement or can benefit from more
inventory workflow automation, it should look
at a warehouse solution that integrates with both
its enterprise and POS solutions. Using barcode
technology, such a solution can produce receiving
documents, and enable employees to track, label,
and tag inventory as soon as it arrives. Employees
who receive it will be able to determine where it
should go within the warehouse, down to a bin on
a shelf on an aisle. It can tell them how a shipment
has been allocated to stores or customers, and
whether an incoming customer return needs to be
put back into stock at full or marked down price. It
can also produce pick tickets for shipping an order
or transferring inventory to another store.
Providing Integrated, Customer-
Friendly In-Store Innovations
Wanting to respond to retailers' need to innovate,
technology providers introduce new devices and
technologies intended to enhance the shopping
experience and provide better service while
integrating to the rest of the system. Innovation
for retailers is about better serving their customers,
not about buying technology just because it's
there. For that reason, the most valuable new
technologies are fresh and easy to adopt right
now, yet offer so much practical value that they
won't become obsolete once any perceived novelty
factor wears off.
One user-friendly technology is interactive kiosks.
These enable customers to research and compare
product offerings while in the store, something
especially useful in the case of specialty or featureladen
products. Kiosks further customer service
when a salesperson isn't available, and also give
customers the choice to get their information
without sales staff if that's their preference.
Customers can use the touch screen on a kiosk to
be prompted through some questions on what they're looking for, and the kiosk will suggest instock
products that most closely meet their needs.
Their searches and comments can be collected,
possibly indicating an interest in products that the
store doesn't currently carry. Similar to studying
website click trails and abandoned carts that don't
result in online sales, the kiosk becomes another
way of understanding where sales are being lost,
but might be able to be captured.
Kiosks can be used for:
- Gift registries (complete with gifts
already purchased and still needed)
- Wish lists
- Personal shopping lists
- Targeted recommendations
- Surveys
- Rebates
They might be easily adopted for taking deli or
bakery orders within supermarkets. A customer
could order a sandwich upon arriving at the
market and pick it up when finished shopping.
Or she could place and pay for a custom cake or
deli platter order for pick up later in the week.
Loyalty programs have tended to focus on
addressing the customer outside of the current
visit, such as with targeted coupons to use next
time. Kiosks could help connect with customers
while actually in the store if they choose to log in
with their membership information for targeted
specials and even a shopping list they've saved. A
retailer also can enable repeat purchases of staples
by reminding customers what they might be
low on based upon previous history. All of this
personalized functionality becomes especially
powerful when it's put to use at all store locations,
and can be accessed by any family member to do the family shopping. Kiosks have media player
functionality, and can be positioned in displays
as merchandising tools, or near customer
checkouts to promote specials or simply the store's
brand identity.
Beyond their ability to serve customers, kiosks
can also be powerful tools for employees. They
can offer training, company news, sales targets,
promotion information, and access to personal
email, schedule, and attendance information. They
can empower sales employees with the information
they need to quickly and accurately answer a
customer's questions or suggest the right product.
With product information readily available, sales
staff becomes more mobile within the store.
Suddenly an employee who isn't very familiar with
digital cameras or appliances can effectively help
customers with them. This empowerment could
have some real benefit for managers, too, for it
holds the potential to make scheduling and break
coverage more flexible without compromising
service. Further, it could enable them to more
specifically hire for service skills and work ethic
instead of technical knowledge, which may be
a better fit with the requirements of a serviceoriented
job.
Mobile POS systems offer some of the same
functionality as kiosks in that they can access
product and customer information from the
sales floor, or, in the case of mobile systems, from
most anywhere. These systems synchronize with
the enterprise solution, so pricing and inventory
information are working from the same data set
as store cash registers. They have the ability to be
used wherever they may help process sales and
shorten customer waiting times, whether this
means during especially busy periods inside the
store, or at sidewalk sales or other events off-site.
They offer flexibility in the use of valuable floor
space, because a store may not be ready to install
another permanent checkout lane, though get busy enough at times that it needs to provide additional
checkout service to keep customers from waiting.
If pleasing customers is the retailer's goal, the
retailer needs to structure its operations to
support managers and employees in achieving
it. Workers know the challenges they face, and
when a solution's configuration can include
input that helps solve these challenges, employees
and managers will be more likely to adopt, love,
and benefit from it. Store managers are often
challenged to spend less time in the back office,
and both mobile and kiosk solutions can help.
An integrated solution can give a manager access
to data through a kiosk, mobile device, or even
her cell phone, so that the routine administrative
tasks that keep her in the back office take less time
and are simpler to accomplish from anywhere. In
this way, more of her focus can be on the aspects of
her job that directly impact customer satisfaction
and sales.
Conclusion
The old assumption that powerful IT
infrastructure is only for bigger retailers no
longer holds
true. With most
retailers unable
to differentiate
themselves on
price alone, they
need holistic
systems that integrate POS, enterprise, and even
warehouse management functions to continuously
improve how they please customers. What's
more, price and execution barriers have been
removed by companies that design their solutions
for flexibility by using Microsoft's scaleable SQL
Server platform and develop to OPOS and ARTS
Data Model standards. These specific technology
choices leave retailers in a position to upgrade and
seize new possibilities while keeping their focus on
customers the whole time.
Case Study
What can all of these ideas look like when they
come together? They can look like the Rocky
Mountain Chocolate Factory's success story. A
combination of individual franchises, multi-store
franchises, and corporate-owned stores, they
have grown to be the largest candy store chain
with 300+ stores internationally at the time of
this writing, though they started with Retail
Anywhere when they were much smaller. To make
this growth possible, they needed a solution to
unify their unique mix of retail, in-store cooking,
and franchise needs. Each store had to run
with a robust POS solution that could handle
high-volume sales, and to also access the central
corporate system. Franchises needed to maintain
individual data such as original recipes and waste
and sample tracking.
Though the set of requirements was complex, Key
Jobson, Chief Information Officer of the Rocky
Mountain Chocolate Factory, selected Retail
Anywhere over larger competitors, "because their
products are the best fit for our retail concept
and their support services are excellent." Retail
Anywhere began implementing the chain's
solution in June, 2001, and to date has integrated
178 locations using the IBM SurePOS 300. The
easy-to-use, unifying system helped to build
strong relationships between individual franchises
and the corporate office, which has access to all
the stores' sales figures and productivity, and is
able to calculate royalties due.
At the same time, corporate is able to support
individual stores better by having a broad
view and learning from sales trends and from
particularly savvy franchise owners. For example,
one franchisee realized that presenting a messyto-
eat item in a different way would make it more
popular with shopping mall customers. This
customer-friendly choice greatly increased sales for this item, and corporate noticed the increase,
and quickly suggested the simple innovation to
other stores. In fact, corporate management has
been so pleased with their overall results using the
Retail Anywhere system that it now requires all
new stores to implement it.
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