The theme of the day in San Francisco (hosted by IBM) was “Necessity & Innovation”. The brochure for the event summarized: “Necessity is the mother invention – or so we have been led to believe. We cannot help but suspect that our needs to create and to shape the world around us run much deeper than simple pragmatism. The deeply human need to produce something extraordinary from nothing remains essential to every great endeavor.”
Don’t Let Procurement Negotiate Enterprise Software Deals – Part 2
Many retailers have gone to using Corporate Procurement and rigid RFP (“request for proposal”) processes that tend to (1) move negotiations towards a transactional and away from a relationship deal, and (2) that causes the retailer to miss new opportunities to transform current business practices.
RBTE 2016: Focus On Employee Empowerment
One of the most enjoyable aspects of attending the Retail Business Technology Event in London (which completed its fifth successful year of operation in March) is that it’s so easy to see in real life what it being talked about at the event. London is a hotbed of very competitive retail shops. The city remains one of the world’s top performers when it comes to retail sales, and the UK overall ranks among the top countries in Internet sales (#1 in 2013). So if you want to see what is happening in Retail, there is no better place to look than London.
Coming To Terms With Retail Planning
Retail planning is a hot topic throughout the industry right now. The burning issue that brings this core capability front-and-center is that demand comes from more than one place: from the stores, the call center, and from the digital space. Matching that demand to supply in a way that is satisfying to consumers is more difficult, as consumers demand more and more cross-channel fulfillment options. The final kick in the shins of the traditional planning cycle is that consumers are more selective and less loyal, and have easy access to information about competitive offers available anytime and anywhere. That means that retailers must react more quickly to shifts in demand than they have had to in the past.
Small Town Blues
Small towns have been in the retail news a lot lately, and not for the best of reasons. In particular, Walmart’s announcement that it would close more than 150 U.S. stores has caused many small towns to cry foul because of lost tax revenue and the impact to local employees and consumers. That complaint is the flip side of the concern expressed for years that Walmart’s entry into a local market destroys small businesses.
Small Retailers: A Dilemma For Tech Services Providers
RSR’s E-Commerce study indicated that small retailers place far higher hopes on digital than the largest retailers do as a way to secure their futures. While that may seem a little counterintuitive (after all, the largest retailers have the most wherewithal to develop the digital side of their selling environments), the smallest retailers see digital as a way to make the shopping experience more enjoyable for their consumers, and thus insulate themselves from large impersonal competitors that otherwise could crowd them out with their big assortments and super-low prices.
RBTE 2016: Retailers Must Be Digital Companies… With Stores
Consumers today have more disposable income, are more confident, are happy to shop across channels, and are more selective — but less loyal. He pointed out that while the state of the consumer is much more positive than one might pick up from the daily news cycle, people have retained the smart shopping habits that they developed in harder times.
Don’t Let Procurement Negotiate Enterprise Software Deals – Part 1
“We have heard anecdotal stories of ‘procurement types’ as gatekeepers (to the software acquisition process). It was bad enough when retailers started using ‘procurement types’ to source merchandise, but to select technology? Seriously? Are any of you really doing this?”
