Showing posts with label IT. Show all posts
2012 Future of Food Retailing Report (Needs registration)
With the U.S. economy experiencing slow growth, persistent unemployment, and stagnant household incomes, consumers are moving toward extremes. Cost-conscious shoppers continue to seek extreme value and acceptable quality or better at low prices. Other shoppers less affected by the downturn have returned to upper-tier food retailers. Retailers who cater to the middle are finding their positions more challenging to maintain. With the most recent bout of food inflation seeming to moderate, the pressure on their sales and profits is likely to continue.
This year’s edition of The Future of Food Retailing Report highlights market share figures for grocery and consumables by store format, illustrates which formats are thriving and look to continue growth in today’s challenging economy, and forecasts how these key formats will perform over the next five years, i.e., by 2016.
PODCAST: John Orr, Trends in Human Capital Management for Retailers
On this two-part podcast, we talked about trends in human capital management and what retailers need as it relates to human capital management.
On part one of the podcast, we focused on compliance among labor laws and visibility of the business. On part two, we addressed the need for speed as a big trend in retailer human capital management.
Retailers are under attack from many angles. There is scarce talent, they’re in a high turnover industry, they’re being legislated left and right, whether it’s gift card legislation in NJ, or California labor laws and class-action lawsuits. We discussed the challenges retailers face navigating through this landscape.
Concerning the challenge of visibility, more and more retailers are expressing the need for better visibility at the store level and above store. Legacy applications, however, have fallen very short in giving retailers access to the information they need. Most retailers are fraught with manual processes, inefficiencies and spreadsheets. The reporting from these systems is not timely enough for the executives to be proactive and make the decisions they need to do on a day-to-day basis. Retailers need solutions that provide intuitive real-time information, and should not be held hostage to legacy systems and interfaces and processes.
The internet, by allowing anonymous browsing and rapid price-comparing, was supposed to mean low, and equal, prices for all. Now, however, online retailers are being offered software that helps them detect shoppers who can afford to pay more or are in a hurry to buy, so as to present pricier options to them or simply charge more for the same stuff.
Technology Grows in Importance for Retailers, New CompTIA Research Study Reveals
Seventy-two percent of retailers surveyed rate technology as important to their business, CompTIA’s Retail Sector Technology Adoption Trends Study reveals. That figure is projected to increase to 83 percent by 2014.
A net 63 percent of retailers expect to increase IT spending in 2012 with the remaining 37 percent planning to cut back or hold the line. Large retailers expect to boost IT spending the most – 4.8 percent, on average. For all firms, the planned average increase is 4.2 percent.
Competing With Amazon on Amazon
Thousands of small merchants depend on Amazon.com Inc. to reach customers who otherwise wouldn't know they exist. A few of them complain, though, that Amazon sometimes eats their lunch.
According to some small retailers, the Seattle-based giant appears to be increasingly using its Marketplace—where third-party retailers sell their wares on the Amazon.com site—as a vast laboratory to spot new products to sell, test sales of potential new goods, and exert more control over pricing.
Retailers using pent-up cash; 58% plan to increase capital spending, with IT No. 1 priority
While waiting for the recovery to take the hold, 58% plan to increase capital spending over the next year. The highest priority investment area is information technology – including data analytics and digital marketing channels – cited by 51% of the executives in the KPMG survey. Other significant areas of investment for retailers are new products or services (43%), geographic expansion (33%), and advertising and marketing (24%).
When asked about digital marketing channels, retail executives in the 2012 KPMG retail survey indicate that online shopping (59%), social media platforms (58%), and email campaigns (49%) are having the most significant impact on their businesses. Additionally, executive indicate that the incorporation of mobile technology is also having a significant impact, specifically mobile shopping (36%), mobile promotions (28%), and mobile payments (21%).
Executives also say that the use of data analytics is playing a larger role in their strategic decision making – including areas such as customer insight, brand and product management, pricing decisions and market expansion.
Why Loyalty Programs Can Be Bad for Business
In my work with companies on pricing strategies, it's common for executives to feel compelled to offer loyal customers something for free. My immediate question is: "Why?" Giving something away for free as a gesture of thanks has become almost reflexive in business. But when you examine the strategic value and underlying costs of these programs, I've found that loyalty discounts are rarely necessary to close a deal, nor are they always highly valued by customers.
Why Sephora Is Betting Big on Digital Shopping
Sephora is one of the brands that’s leading the way in shaping digital experiences for its customers. The company recently invested in an entirely new shopping experience that integrates mobile, social and in-store activity. On this episode of Revolution, Julie Bornstein, SVP Digital at Sephora, shares with us the importance of delivering a holistic digital and “IRL” experience, while also enhancing the individual path each customer takes to engage with the brand and their favorite products.
Brazilian fashion retailer displays Facebook ‘likes’ for items in its real-world stores
Through its new “Fashion Like” initiative, C&A has posted photos of a number of the clothing items it sells on a dedicated Facebook page, where it invites customers to “like” the ones that appeal to them. Special hooks on the racks in its bricks-and-mortar store, meanwhile, can then display those votes in real time, giving in-store shoppers a clear indication of each item’s online popularity. The video below (in Portuguese) outlines the premise in more detail:
Home Depot Rolls Out New Mobile Devices for Workers
Home Depot has started to roll out a scaled down, second generation mobile device for its sales associates, allowing more workers to use wireless technology to assist customers, CIO Matt Carey told CIO Journal. The 25,000 device roll-out is intended to make it possible for more store workers to help customers locate items and give information on products, even in areas for which they don’t have specialized expertise. It’s also an example of how Home Depot is attempting to use technology to increase the amount customers spend on each trip to the store, as well as sales to new customers, an area of focus as the chain has slowed the opening of new stores.
The device, called First Phone Junior, is a scaled-down version of the Motorola phone the company put in the hands of some associates two years ago, which allowed employees to better manage inventory, assist customers and speed checkout lines.
While the long-predicted demise of the bricks-and-mortar store has been greatly exaggerated, there is no doubt that customers are migrating to digital channels in growing numbers. Accenture looks at the issues, and identifies three steps that retailers can take to rethink the way they attract, serve and retain customers, then allocate capital and resources accordingly.
IBM Survey Reveals Marketers Face Tech Dilemma in Reaching the Connected Consumer
IBM's new survey of the marketing industry finds that chief marketing officers (CMO) and chief information officers (CIO) must join forces in order to connect with today's consumer across new channels including mobile devices and social networks. Fully 60 percent of marketers point to their lack of alignment with the company's IT department as the biggest obstacle to reaching today's consumers.
In the burgeoning India Retail Organized sector, IT is being taken seriously with retailers starting to leverage IT for setting up basic infrastructure for doing business. A report in Express Computer discusses how Indian Retailers although being late are adopting IT for innovations at back end as well as consumer facing end.
“It is estimated that over $2.5 billion will be spent on IT in the Indian retail sector by 2010. This will include the cost of acquiring new assets as well as looking after existing infrastructure. Over 40% of this will be spent on software and services,” said Ajay Aggarwal, Founder, Seacom.
According to Patrick Mathias, Regional Manager-Enterprise, Cisco India, “Of the total investment, approximately 4-10% is invested in IT. And within this approximately 30-40% is meant for networking infrastructure.”
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The IT innovation revolution in retail is steadily taking shape in India. The process is such that it has the potential to change the way in which we purchase even the basic necessities such as groceries and vegetables. Innovation is happening not just at the backend, but also at the customer facing end. It’s taking place all over, right from where the customer enters a store to the point where he leaves. This essentially covers the whole process of buying of products, right from selecting to decision making and paying at the checkout counter.
“Innovations in the retail industry are multi pronged and are aimed at enhancing the end user experience, optimizing resources and logistics, creating a technology platform to keep pace with the dynamics of the industry and manage the unprecedented growth given the geographic spread and diversity,” said Dr. Anurag Srivastava, Vice President, Consulting Division, Wipro.
ComputerWeekly has an article with focus on careers in Retail IT. Retailers are moving from Legacy systems to newer technologies with Multi-channel Retailing taking prominence.
The days when retail relied exclusively on legacy IT are gone, and the sector offers opportunities to spearhead roll-outs of cutting-edge technology
Retail has traditionally been a relatively unattractive sector for IT professionals, with low investment in technology.
"Some retailers are still running AS/400-based systems developed 15 years ago," says Iain McKeand, head of the regional CIO practice at Harvey Nash, who spends much of his time recruiting for senior roles in the retail sector.
But things are changing. "Retailers are realising they need to raise spending on IT from less than 1% of turnover to between 1% and 2%.
"Those legacy systems may have been robust in the past, but they cannot cope with supporting the move to multiple channels," says McKeand.
Some new facts from Retail Recruitment side of view:
1. Whereas Vadher has used open source systems, Jane Binner, an associate director with recruiters Computer People, says that the retail sector runs mainly on Microsoft technologies such as ASP, C# and in some cases Visual Basic.
2. Breaking into retail can be tricky because retailers prefer to hire IT staff with retail experience.
"They can identify with the issues customers and store managers have. They understand what competitors are doing, and where the sector as a whole is going in the next six months," Binner says.
3. ...at many retailers, new recruits spend some of their induction period working in stores, either behind the counter or in the stockroom. Some retailers go further and will ask IT candidates, particularly for senior roles, to work in store as part of the selection process, with the evaluation of the store manager performing part of the assessment.
"That reflects the importance placed in good interpersonal and stakeholder skills," McKeand says.
4. Hours can also be long. "Retail inevitably demands working outside normal nine-to-five hours, especially if the retailer is a seven-day operation," McKeand says.
Vadher says that there are often extra seasonal pressures. "Christmas is the hardest part of the year and is quite stressful. We get a lot of stick from the rest of the business at any time of year when there are IT problems," he says.
5. Salaries in the retail sector also tend to be lower than some equally high pressure sectors such as finance, although McKeand says salaries are still attractive.
In the latest issue of Integrated Solutions For Retailers, there is a nice article by Tomax CEO, Eric Olafson. The article is about how Retail Enterprises silos, the "us vs them" mentality, exists as a friction against efforts to connect strategy with in-store execution. Technology while being a solution to this issue becomes a problem too.
In search of the elusive ‘best of breed,’ retailers implement point solutions within narrowly defined process and procedural boundaries. Meanwhile, software vendors spin out new, denser versions of these applications, resulting in a cottage industry called application integration.
Worse still, each point solution requires nearly the same data, a cancer that exists across all retail IT – the burgeoning complexity of disparate solutions and underlying data integration issues that more or less brings IT progress to a coagulated halt.
Retailers are taking these issues in their stride and embracing technologies like SOA, workflows, open standards which help bridge the divide.
Happily, we are observing an industry trend to embrace technology to transcend silos. The emergence of SOA (service-oriented architecture), workflow, open standards, and source technologies are enabling new solutions and approaches that are process-driven, lightweight, faster to implement, and flexible. These same technologies drive new delivery mechanisms, giving rise, for example, to the adoption of software as a service (SaaS), where the solutions providers deliver and manage solutions faster and more economically than the retailer could on their own.
Another important trend is data centralization. The cost of dividing and duplicating data in support of multiple applications occupies a great percentage of IT budgets. Now, a single version of the retailer’s information can support multiple applications, reporting instruments, and real-time event-driving workflow management. The cost reductions associated are massive.
On a related note, read this more elaborate article on the same topic by Tomax CEO, Eric Olafson.
Retailers spending over $120 billion on IT and communications in 2007
by Deepak Sharma on Thursday, June 14, 2007
According to a new report by IHL Consulting, retailers are investing around USD 120 B this year in IT and communications technologies worldwide.
Retailers are heavily investing in IT and communications technologies worldwide, to the tune of over $120 billion this year, according to Retail WorldView, a new IT Sizing service offered by IHL Consulting Group. "Retailers individually spend well below other industries, about one-third of the amount per revenue dollar compared to financial services and insurance, said Greg Buzek, president of IHL Consulting Group. "However, what retailers lack in spending percentage of revenue they clearly make up in sheer volume, due to their high revenues."
IHL Consulting says retail is a huge market for IT, one that is growing just over 9% per year. North America represents about 45% ($54 Billion) of the overall total in technology spend in retail, with Europe/Middle East/Africa representing another 28% of the market. While the Asia/Pacific market represents only 15% of the worldwide IT spend, the region’s collective retail IT spend is increasing at a rate of over 20% annually and is expected to do so for the next 3 years.
