The History Of The Retail Management

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Retailing is a "technology intensive" industry. It is a well known fact that the retail industry always works on razor thin margin and the key to survival lies in optimizing the resources both in space and time parameters as well as maximization of customer satisfaction.. retailers today shorten lead time, reduce inventory, and save cost.

Due to the increase in globalization of retailers in terms of their points-of-sale, as well as their Points-of-supply, the Information Technology (IT) spend in the retail sector has increased considerably and plays an increasingly important role in managing the complexity of retail operations.

It is said that "...retailers who do not manage their IT landscape effectively will find that, in time, the IT systems become part of the problem rather than components of the solution."

At the turn of the twenty-first century, there were few global retail chains. Most retail chains were local to countries. This has given way to a globalized set of retailers such as Wal-Mart, Tesco, GAP, IKEA, and others. With the increase in globalization of retailers both in terms of their points-of-sale, as well as their points-of-supply, the Information Technology (IT)

spend in the retail sector has increased considerably and plays an increasingly important role in managing the complexity of retail operations. Gartner estimated the increased IT spending to be about 13 percent CAGR from 2000 through 2004. However, the corresponding growth in revenues for the retail sector has been at only about two percent, translating IT costs to be a larger fraction of the overall cost base of the retail sector. This has resulted in considerable pressure on IT to deliver value in the retail sector as well as closer scrutiny of the IT spends.

Access to timely and even real-time information to a wide variety of channel and trading partners, sales personnel, line managers, store managers etc. is the key to achieving this. Over the years as the consumer demand increased and the retailers geared up to meet this increase, technology evolved rapidly to support this growth. It is technology that will help the retailers to score in such fierce competition. There are hardware and software tools that have now become almost essential for retailing. Consumers have come to expect more value and higher service levels. As a consequence, the technology continues to grow and retailers search for ways to measure technical business value and to balance the effective utilization of the technical resource. Retailers want to get more value out of technologies and ensure they are spending their limited resources in ways that improve their overall offer to the customer. Technology has proven to be a competitive weapon in retail, which is a dramatic shift from a decade ago. In response, retailers generally need to become more disciplined in managing the IT function. Completing and delivering IT projects on time and on budget is overwhelming enough without the project team considering their project’s interdependencies with other business initiatives and corporate goals

Business intelligence in retail - BI in Retail/FMCG Industry Introduction Every organization generates large amount of data from their day to day operation. From the pool of humongous data, some of them are able to harvest useful information; termed as Business Intelligence (BI). Organizations which are able to develop business intelligence as a competitive advantage not only focus on descriptive analytics and reporting, rather on predictive analytics to take more effective steps towards delivering better performance and stronger bottom-line. Extended supply chains and globally dispersed customer base has made managers more keen to use decision support systems based on sound logical framework rather than going with their experience and gut-feelings.BI refers to the skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).In nutshell we can say Business intelligence (BI) is computer based techniques that are used to spot, dig out, and analyze business data, such as Sales compared to budget/target or Sales compared to last year(or any other period) or revenues per department/product. BI not only provides historical and current view of business but also helps in predicting future view of business operations. Various functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Technology has transformed the buying behavior of customers everywhere. Technology in the store is all moving toward integration and more and more savvy customers. POS is undergoing major changes because of broadband access, the need and ability for inventory visibility, customers ordering online, returns and pick-up in the store and also the movement toward an ASP (application service provider) model. "Better broadband access is incredibly important and is one of the true disruptive technologies" as said by Greg Buzek president of IHL consulting. It is broadband that will help to transfer the information fast and help retailers to serve their customers on time. Technology offer retailers the potential to know exactly how many customers are in their stores by department and time of day. The Footfall division of Experience was at NRF making the case for accurately counting customers to produce valuable data that influences operational decisions, such as labour scheduling. Findings proved that a mere 20% of shoppers are actually advocates of retailers, K. Jotwani. Director, marketing and strategy. Retail Store Solutions, IBM Systems and Technology Group, which leaves 80% of shoppers who do not advocate, let alone give their loyalty, to any specific retailers, which shows that there is a room for improvement to give better customer service with the help of technology. As today’s world problem of global warming, technological companies have understood the importance of "Going Green" and are taking green initiatives by producing environmentally Earth-friendly products and processes to reduce the burden on the environment. IBM unveiled its Green Retail Store, a portfolio of technologies and services designed to improve energy and operational efficiency across a retailer's IT operation. Retailers are finding ways to get communicate with customer and new ways of marketing and technology has made it easier for them such as Downtown Locker Room (DTLR) expects to increase store traffic and sales by targeting shoppers with text message based promotions. Store-level customer service can be an Achilles’ heel for many chains, and this has been made easy by technology in near future there would be media carts which would provide customers a cutting edge shopping experience. Media 3

 4. carts would provide a screen on the trolley to improve communication with the customer during the in-store shopping trip. There are easySHOP system by Stop & Shop, Quincy, Mass., which has self-check out solution for customer with the help of Motorola MCI7 mobile computer, runs software from Boston based Modiv Media that supports self scanning, instant price checks and self checkout. It is a unit which sits on a shopping cart, also delivers targeted promotions based on users shopping behaviour, redemption history, in-store location tracking and previously scanned merchandise which would help to keep customers track and help customer’s to escape standing in the long cue’s for paying the bills for hours. Being a "technology-intensive industry, it needs workers who are technologically savvy. There are technical high schools where students would be taught basics of retail sales in which they will study loss prevention software, point-of-sale systems and other technical aspects of retail, along with traditional topics such as wholesale buying, customer service and marketing. Objective: This paper discusses the different technologies that are implemented in retail stores, and how retail players are applying these technologies to reduce the operational and technological gap in order to compete in this globally competing environment. Hypothesis: Information technology in store operations will provide a competitive advantage and improve sales. Keywords: Retail Technology, Store operations, Information technology in store, Expected Results: Implementation of Information Technology will improve customer retention. It will increase footfalls and customer conversion rate.