A new study by Tata Consultancy Services done in conjunction with Forrester Consulting looked at the state of IT within the global retail industry and CIOs’ attitudes and plans toward key trends and ever-more disruptive, challenging technologies.

TCS Study Shows Retail CIOs are Primed to Lead the Innovation Agenda

In-depth interviews with senior business and IT executives at global retailers found that the potential for CIOs to embrace disruptive technologies are too often hampered by a lack of key resources and business alignment. This is illustrated through the fact that almost two thirds (64 percent) of global retailers consider cost reduction as a major focus over the next few years, versus only two fifths (38 percent) citing innovation.

While the focus is still revenue growth, Retail CIOs believe that the disruptive technologies of mobility, social media, cloud and Big Data will continue to radically transform the retail industry status quo, yet they are not staffed or structured adequately to take full advantage.

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Who knew Cloud computing can combat Warehouse Theft.

How Amazon uses big data to prevent warehouse theft

According to Henry, Amazon has more than 1.5 billion items in its retail catalog and more than 200 fulfillment centers around the world. That’s a lot of objects in a lot of places for the online retailer to keep track of. Keeping the most valuable items protected isn’t as easy as just putting the highest-priced products under lock and key. As Henry said, sometimes, due to limited availability or other factors, a lower-priced product might actually be more highly sought-after by criminals. There’s also the question of how big the cage is, how big the item is, how many items can be fit in each cage, and so on.

To determine which items are most likely to be stolen, Amazon stores the product catalog data in S3, which ends up having more than 50 million updates a week. The team spins up Amazon compute clusters every 30 minutes, crunch the data, and the data is fed back to the warehouse and website. At the center of the service is the new Elastic Map Reduce, a new hosted Hadoop framework running on AWS that lets customers spin up the equivalent of a supercomputer for processing big data.

Retailers who are thinking of moving to Cloud computing should read the latest whitepaper from Microsoft, Driving Revenue and Innovation in Retail with Windows Azure. The Whitepaper provides solution scenarios along with workload patterns for these scenarios and examples from the industry.

Momentum is building around cloud scenarios applicable to retailing by enabling business agility at lower cost.  Microsoft has made a strong commitment to cloud computing to help retailers connect with consumers whenever and wherever they choose.  Windows Azure provides a platform and a set of services that can be used individually or together.  It is a flexible and interoperable platform that is use to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based service-oriented capabilities.

There are business-enabling benefits for retail enterprises, including the ability to extend services related to products and retail offerings directly to consumers. The global reach that can be achieved will enable retailers to deliver products through vastly extended supply chains and product-sourcing approaches. A cloud computing strategy that is integrated with existing business plans will have the effect of reducing cost and increasing services to customers throughout the world.

Download Whitepaper.

Retailers need to leverage every successful opportunity in the coming year, but do they have the visibility to identify them in a timely way?

Distributing timely and accurate information across the retail enterprise to support distinctive business successes is the envy of every retailer.  Without the right systems to distribute the data and tools to bring focus to the information, opportunities quickly fade from view.  Does your business get the word out and empower field managers, analysts and executives to initiate change?

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that NYC-based apparel manufacturer Bernard Chaus is using SKYPAD delivered analytics through cloud computing to improve sales, analyze in-season buying trends, and track the hottest selling products by store -- down to style, size and color. SKYPAD is enabling Managers at all levels of the organization to make informed decisions based on the timely and accurate receipt of sales data, providing the flexibility to react globally and locally to instant trends. 

Bernard Chaus, Inc., a midsize manufacturer and distributor of women's career and casual sportswear, was looking to streamline its sales and merchandising efforts and create a detailed, accurate view of weekly sales trends for their decision makers. With previous manual data collection processes and Excel spreadsheets, there was no guarantee that sales information was correct or all inclusive, compromising the company's ability to react to fluctuations in sales.

Working with IBM and IBM Business Partner SKY I.T. Group, the company developed an analytics-based solution called SkyPAD that provides a weekly report of key business metrics via a web-based dashboard.  The dashboard enables improved decision making across product pricing, assortment design, production and distribution.  Using the system, Chaus can quickly spot fast selling items, shift products between stores, adjust pricing and make in-season adjustments based on proven consumer demand.  Chaus also has the capability to instantly compare profit margins across different retail outlets to identify future brand positioning strategies. 

SKYPAD Enables Retailers to:

- Get comprehensive retailer reports faster

- Automate reporting into ONE easy to use platform

- Easily analyze data based on YOUR specific initiatives

- Seamlessly integrate spreadsheets, EDI and portal data into ONE view

- Increase accuracy, productivity and team focus

- Utilize images, scalability and consistency not possible with Excel

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With soft consumer spending, retailers are investing in process improvements and technology to more effectively control their spending and protect their profits. They are under constant pricing pressure from incurring costs associated with operating distributed store locations, warehouses, etc. Here is where company like Coupa comes in. Coupa provides a cloud solution that combines e-procurement and expense management into one platform which offers several advantages to retailers to adopt smarter spending practices:

• Enables companies to save money because they have greater visibility into the expense pool
• Can drill down and audit problem areas of spending, curb "maverick" spending
• Because it's cloud based, all this data is accessible in real-time and provides the ability to track spending behaviors, see trends both internally and against how other companies are doing/spending and set benchmarks, and then adjust practices moving forward.

Coupa just announced a significant uptick in the number of retail and franchise businesses selecting Coupa to more effectively manage and control their indirect spending. Here’s the complete news release:

Retailers Flock to Coupa Cloud Spend Management to Cut Costs

The Container Store, Michaels and Others Protect their Bottom Line from Slowed Consumer Spending

SAN MATEO, Calif. – August 3, 2010 – Coupa Software, the leading provider of disruptive and innovative cloud spend management (CSM) solutions for squeezing savings from business operations, today announced a significant uptick in the number of retail and franchise businesses selecting Coupa to more effectively manage and control their indirect spending.

Express, Inc., The Limited, Michaels, The Container Store, Dollar General, and a prominent specialty retailer of stylish home furnishings and high quality cookware are among the retailers leveraging Coupa’s platform for their e-procurement needs.

With soft consumer spending renewing worries about a fragile economic recovery, retailers and franchise businesses are investing in process improvements and technology innovations to more effectively control their spending and protect their profits. Coupa Cloud Spend Management offers several advantages to retailers eager to adopt smarter spending practices, including:

• Centralized control over procurement processes and greater visibility into spending at the store level, without having to deploy IT resources or professional buyers in each location.
• Broad adoption with an easy-to-use solution that requires minimal change management and training to learn or adopt, perfect for workforces characterized by non-office personnel, or that have high turnover or seasonal fluctuations in their employee base.
• Ability to segregate content and streamline store-level purchasing through content groups. For example, with Coupa, retailers can segregate catalog items, how to buy policies, contracts, punchout sites and more by region, store layout, or other logical grouping to standardize ordering processes in each location.
• Full budgeting support, including budget remaining checks before requisitions are approved, and roll-up reporting for store-level, and regional (or district) spending relative to budget.
• Universal access via any web browser. As the only true multi-tenant cloud company in the e-procurement category, the software can be accessed from the Amazon cloud via any web browser.  There is no hardware to buy, or software to install.
• Fast time to value. Everything you need to get started is included in a single subscription price and standard implementations are free, perfect for organizations designed to be self-sufficient at the store level, without expensive IT overhead.

“Coupa’s traction in our industry does not surprise me at all,” said Scott Jones, Purchasing Agent and Coupa Project Manager at The Container Store. “The dynamics of the retail business model demand efficient and cost-effective operations. Coupa’s cloud-based e-procurement solution fits that need perfectly. We’ve been very successful with the software.”

The Container Store, a Coupa customer since 2008, eliminated stockpiling and supply over-ordering at the store level by integrating Coupa with its warehouse management and supplier systems. By managing its requisition and purchase order processes through Coupa, The Container Store can accurately charge supply costs to individual stores based on supply usage, instead of more arbitrary measures like cost allocation based on percent of sales volume. The company reduced the number of SKUs managed in-house by 60%, and now processes 50% fewer purchase orders per week. Time savings generated by improved processes allowed the company to act on the spend intelligence gathered to negotiate new contracts for greater pricing discounts.

“Brick and mortar retailers have certain advantages over their online counterparts, but they are also under constant pricing pressure from pure online competitors who do not incur the same costs associated with operating distributed store locations,” said Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa Software. “It’s absolutely critical that retailers keep a watchful eye over every dollar of spend. And industry leaders are doing so with Coupa.”

About Coupa Software
Coupa is the leading provider of disruptive and innovative cloud spend management (CSM) solutions that help companies control their indirect spending and generate savings that go direct to the bottom line. Coupa combines the best e-procurement and expense management capabilities in a single solution that is easier to use, faster to configure and deploy, and more cost-effective than anything available today. With deep domain knowledge in e-procurement and expense management, a best-in-class cloud computing platform, a fast-growing community of customers, and industry-first innovations like real-time benchmarking, intelligent expense report auditing, and crowd sourcing great deals on the Web, Coupa is leading the way in helping companies spend smarter and save more. For more information please visit, http://www.coupa.com or call 650.931.3200.