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There are various degrees of cloudiness, or various layers of it, if you want to look at it that way. But there’s a huge difference between a company that has outsourced its hardware and basic infrastructure support, and a company that is all-in on a multi-tenant business software solution, with no customizations or extensions to that solution.
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.”
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.
Last week I was speaking with a client about managing merchandise plans. In the course of the conversation I asked “How many of your clients are still using the Retail Method of accounting?” Much to my surprise, and to their own apparent dismay, the answer was “most of them.”
The IoT is not new. In fact, I first heard the term bandied about at the RFID Center at the Auto-ID labs at MIT, when I first became an analyst in 2002-2003. Back then, it was all about RFID. Now it’s about a little bit of everything when it comes to location-awareness, with everything from refrigerators to our mobile devices sending out “Hello World” beacons to anything or anyone who might want to pair with them.
Merchandising is typically based on planning two ways – top down and bottoms up. In the top down scenario, the retailer declares a growth target: “We plan on growing sales by 5% next year.” And then it is up to merchandisers to figure out where and how that growth will come. If the retailer is on the ball, they then reconcile these two – the expected budgets for revenue and the expected number of units sold – to see if they come anywhere near each other in terms of expectations.
In an age when personalization is on the lips of nearly every solution provider and every retail conference attendee, RSR’s experience has thus far been that genuine personalization is still a long ways off.
The best-performing retailers understand this fact, and in our latest benchmark report on Mobillity in Retail, tell us they recognize that deeper customer engagement’s greatest promise is to drive sales.
The tagline for the CFA is pretty clear: It’s “The Association For Professionals In The Asset-based Lending And Factoring Industry.”Now, this may sound dry as toast to some of you, but indulge me a few minutes here…because truth be told, without the companies that are part of this group, the retail industry would quite literally come to a screeching halt. And for those of you who self-identify as “laggards” – sales running below the rate of inflation, members of this group, who specialize in financing and turnaround planning for depressed companies, may make the difference between survival and your company’s end of days. That’s how important a lender or restructurer who understands retail can be.
Last week I paid my first visit to Warby Parker in Wynwood, Miami. The visit was noteworthy for several reasons: a great customer experience, very comfortable glasses, and a completely different model of optician.
Back in January, the folks at Aptos asked us to help them figure out the success retailers are having with cross-channel fulfillment. We all know that many retailers are willing to let customers “have it our way” when it comes to satisfying demand. We also had a feeling that it might be working, but it likely wasn’t working all that well.