In order to respond to consumer demands today, retail supply chain management calls for a drive towards shorter, more predictable, and more flexible supply chains. The pursuit of optimal costs and solid inventory management practices are also required.  Retailers with legacy systems and processes are struggling to meet these demands and adapt to the fast pace of change needed to sustain consumer attention. These legacy models typically cannot respond quickly enough and do not provide the necessary visibility to make real-time decisions.

Transparency is critical to meet this need for speed: a retailer with full visibility into its supply chain can more accurately assess the health of its chain, including inventory levels and locations. This provides the ability to fulfill products from different sources to get the freshest, fastest, and most economical replenishment and fulfillment.  Likewise, processes can change to increase efficiency, agility, and better serve the consumer. It also allows for better collaboration across the chain to meet new consumer requirements or spikes in demand.  Where information flows freely, innovation and efficiency follow.

Investing in cloud-based adaptable data services and management solutions is one way to achieve transparency. They deliver seamless access to and advanced insights from information systems. Cloud-based solutions offer flexible, cost-effective, and secure options for information sharing between employees in the same company and between partners in cooperating companies. In addition, these solutions make aggregating the inventory systems of multiple parties in the supply chain more feasible. This leads to better visibility into product availability and the potential for a distributed order management capability.

Consumers also demand insight into product availability and location. Purchase journeys often involve online, mobile, and in-store shopping – potentially at more than one location – before converting. Modern retailers are expected to make it easy to determine the fastest or most efficient way for consumers to purchase or experience a product. Integrated cloud-based solutions can help deliver on this expectation. They allow retailers to merge digital and brick-and-mortar inventories, which is necessary to serve the omnichannel consumer and give them the most up-to-date product locations information.

Information transparency in store leads to better customer service, especially as it relates to consumers finding the products they seek. RFID-enabled inventory, supported by a cloud-based data solution, provides store employees and systems visibility into what inventory is available and where it is physically located for fast retrieval.  As click and collect gains in popularity, retailers also must be able to accurately manage inventory to meet consumer needs from both online and in store traffic. And, as consumers continue to demand fast shipping, stores can begin to build a micro-warehousing capability for digital orders with greater visibility into their inventory.

At Microsoft, we understand the challenges of retail transformation and can help you leverage the capabilities of AI and machine learning to improve the responsiveness of your supply chain.

For more of our perspective on retail supply chain optimization, read The Anywhere, Anytime Consumer: Adapting the Retail Supply Chain, an e-book written by retail strategy and technology experts from Microsoft Services.

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Firstline employees are central to the retail customer experience, so establishing a culture of employee empowerment is transformative to how customers engage with your retail brand.

When the retail firstline isn’t empowered with the tools, information, and insights they need, customers and employees become frustrated together and resort to using platforms and resources beyond the brand’s control. This leads to employees seeking ad hoc information and using suboptimal systems and consumer-grade apps on their personal devices, and customers expanding their search to sources that may lead them to competitors.

In addition, firstline employees are spread across locations with variable exposure to corporate messages, and they don’t always connect with the company’s culture and goals. Technology can help magnify and measure the impact of efforts to remedy this issue, providing both an amplifier and a microphone—an amplifier to share messages, inspiration, training, and insights, and a microphone to measure employee engagement, sentiment, knowledge, and capability.

An empowered firstline will contribute in more meaningful ways to the ideal of a frictionless customer experience—one that deepens the customer–employee relationship, unlocking new value.  A few examples include:

• Improved collaboration tools that help employees communicate, raise and solve issues, share insights on products and merchandising, and get the information they need to be more effective.
• Better digital training tools that adapt to the employee, helping them develop skills to perform more effectively and provide better customer service. These tools include augmented reality (AR) interfaces that can be used to enhance safety training (e.g., forklift safety) and education on new products and services.
• Better scheduling tools, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to provide firstline employees more flexibility and help retailers plan their workforce more effectively.

Along with technology, a culture of empowerment hinges on employers enabling their firstline to be effective and connected team members, customer-centric advocates, and informed and confident employees.

To learn more about the importance of an empowered firstline in today’s retail environment, read Transforming customer service through empowered employees, a new e-book written by retail strategy and technology experts from Microsoft Services.

Interested in learning more about how can retailers can better empower their employees and front-line workers to delight customers? Watch our on-demand webinar, The Five Most Important Decisions Facing Today’s Retail CEOs, where special guest Doug Stephens, Founder of Retail Prophet, discusses this topic, as well as shares his experience meeting with brand leaders from across the retail spectrum at NRF 2019.  You can also watch the video trailer here.

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This environment is vastly different from the pre-digital era, where information in the marketplace was fragmented and worked to the retailer’s advantage. Comparison shopping required significantly more time and effort than scrolling through options online. This imbalance also allowed retailers to push products to the consumer, a model that was cyclical and relatively predictable. Consumers’ expectations matched the slower pace of new product creation, and comparatively long lead times in the supply chain were acceptable. 

Today, however, complex globalized retail supply chains run by legacy systems are feeling the pains of this faster pace and the need for a broader range of choices. How can retail supply chains increase their responsiveness and meet consumers’ expectations? 

Understanding the consumer in detail – to be able to better forecast product and inventory needs – is one key to success. Artificial intelligence (AI), with its business intelligence and analytics applications and cognitive services, can help retailers achieve more specificity in data. It allows them to analyze consumer behavior with more granularity than ever – potentially to the level of consumer segments of one. AI also can be used to target consumers more accurately with personalized offers – necessary to compete in an era of mass personalization – which can lead to better conversion and more predictable sales.  

Another key to success is responsiveness. When viral trends or other unanticipated events create spikes in demand, machine learning draws real-time insights and recommends actions, based on evidence, faster than any human. It takes data-driven decision making to a new level, one that is crucial to support a nimble supply chain in an ever-changing marketplace. 

See intelligent supply chain innovation at NRF 2018

At Microsoft Enterprise Services, we understand the challenges of Digital Transformation and can help you leverage the capabilities of AI and machine learning to improve the responsiveness of your supply chain.

In our Microsoft Booth #2803 at NRF 2018, you can wander through our simulated supply chain environment for a street-level look at the real possibilities of intelligent technology to create consumer-centric supply chains. You’ll see how Microsoft innovations like Cortana Intelligence Suite solutions power advanced analytics and predictive capabilities to enable retailers to gather insights on shoppers’ demographics and preferences, improve customer service and response time, optimize forecasting and inventory levels, personalize offerings, and better manage their supply chains to accommodate customer demand.

We look forward to seeing you at this year’s event!

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Can you remember the first item you bought online? At the time, it must have seemed remarkable, if not a little nerve wracking. Today, the retail landscape has shifted so massively and permanently that we take the online channel for granted. The convenience of online shopping is fantastic for consumers, who can have products shipped from a company halfway around the world with just a click. However, many retailers are struggling with legacy systems that don’t integrate sales channels.

To stay competitive in the 21^st century, retailers need an integrated system that can provide revolutionary visibility across sales channels and international borders. The system also needs to be adaptable to inevitable business change and transformation – by 2020, 80% of business processes will be reinvented, digitized, or eliminated. This type of transformation can be painful, but the benefits significantly outweigh the costs. According to a recent IDC report, retail companies that take advantage of their data can potentially gain an additional $94 billion in revenue over companies that don’t.

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 prepares your company to compete in the increasingly digital and global retail landscape. As an end-to-end, omni-channel solution, it handles the full spectrum of retail operations – from the first link in the supply chain to the point-of-sale (POS). Read on to find out how Dynamics 365  can transform your business from end to end.

Transform your products and optimize your operations

When launching a new product, you need to accurately identify trends, source from global suppliers, merchandise effectively, design a marketing strategy, and manage inventory logistics. To improve your strategic decisions from end to end, you need a 360-degree view of your business. Dynamics 365 helps you make better tactical and financial choices by centralizing sales and inventory data across all channels. It provides a single system for managing every link in the supply chain, from sourcing and merchandising to warehousing and distribution. It makes it easy to categorize products, define pricing, and maintain the stock that customers want, when and where they want it.

Engage your customers across channels

Your customers are increasingly engaging with your brand through social media, mobile apps, and websites in addition to physical stores. 84% of customers report that they browse products on digital devices before, during or after visiting a store. As shoppers move from one channel to the next, they expect a seamless experience. With Dynamics 365 for retail, you can deliver frictionless engagement across every touchpoint – including catalog, call-center, and in-store kiosks. Instead of cobbling together data from siloed systems, Dynamics 365 gives you one tool for tracking sales results across channels and maintaining consistent customer-facing information.

Empower your employees

Although consumers shop with the aid of devices, they still value the in-store experience: 72% plan to shop in stores as much as they did last year. Dynamics 365 for retail empowers your employees to improve store operations in two key ways. First, it helps them provide world-class customer service and expedite checkouts with a mobile point-of-sale that displays up-to-date product, promotion, and customer information. Second, the solution’s role-optimized productivity tools simplify daily tasks like work orders, inventory, and reports, which frees employees to spend time on more valuable activities.  The solution also untethers mobile workers such as field sales associates by giving them access to the business system from mobile devices in the field.

Learn more

Microsoft & Dynamics are ready to help retailers with their easily-deployed Dynamics 365 for Retail. Dynamics 365 is a comprehensive omnichannel solution that provides out of the box analytics for every part of your business. Scalable and global, Dynamics 365 can grow with your business with streamlined business processes and cost effective cloud powered infrastructure. The solution is flexible and integrates with existing technology, so it can be deployed with or without an existing POS.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 for Retail, or take a guided tour.

The post Conquer global omnichannel challenges by embracing digital transformation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Uncover a world of innovative opportunities such as reducing maintenance costs and minimize system failures by implementing condition-based predictive maintenance. Better management of remotely controlled vehicles. Enhance presale and cross-sale efforts through the collection of usage data. Minimize failures and eliminate unused features by using research insights early within the product development cycle.

This white paper demonstrates how Microsoft Services is helping manufacturers transform and achieve more leveraging IoT.

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To stay competitive and grow, retailers need to drive efficiency into the business by addressing these four major pain points:

1. Higher Customer Expectations: Customers expect to engage with retailers seamlessly across multiple channels, anytime, anywhere.
2. Disconnected System Landscape: Maintaining a diverse landscape of operating systems to address these channels leads to multiple, siloed data sources and higher costs.
3. Too Much Data, Not Enough Knowledge: Retailers have high volumes of data produced by multiple touchpoints but are often unequipped to know how to leverage valuable insights from that data.
4. Disadvantaged Sales Associates: Employees are less informed than their connected customers, making it difficult to provide a truly personal level of service.

Ultimately, those who can create a differentiated customer experience within a tight cost model will be the be the next big winners in retail. Solving the pain points through a common platform across channels and effectively using insights from data will enable retailers to deliver an exceptional customer experience in a cost effective and scalable way. Let’s explore how integrated management systems empower retailers to tackle all four pain points and differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market.

High customer expectations: Customers expect omni-channel engagement

While storefronts remain the primary avenue of purchase, mobile has become the primary method of initial engagement. During Black Friday 2016, over 50% of visits to retail websites were on mobile devices, and mobile shopping broke $1B in sales.[ii] Since people are starting on mobile apps and completing their purchase in the store, or vice versa, it’s no surprise that 85% of customers expect a seamless experience across all channels.[iii]  Today, 50% of consumers count on retailers to have options to buy online and pick up in store,[iv] a step that requires retailers to have real time integration across digital and brick and mortar commerce engines.

The best way to enable these cross-channel services is to implement a unified solution with a single commerce engine. This ensures customers experience the same brand messaging and product information across every channel with a single data source. By providing consistent information, costs are cut by streamlining the transaction record, errors are reduced, and the shopping experience is frictionless and flexible to meet the consumer’s need to make an anywhere, anytime purchase decision.

Disconnected system landscape: Different channels have siloed data

An online presence is a necessity in today’s world, but many retailers often host their online data on disparate platforms or legacy systems – completely siloed from physical store data. Because of this, retailers can’t track business real time across the channels and inventory, sales trends, and customer profiles must be synced between the systems with complex integrations. To truly operate an omni-channel operation cost effectively, a retailer must be able to see and predict inventory issues quickly, as selling seasons are shorter and spikier than ever. Approximately 30% of retail sales occur during the 5 to 6 weeks of holiday season,[v] yet they are based on planning and stock commitments made months earlier. Optimizing stock across channels and reacting quickly to make adjustments will reduce costly excess inventory and lost sales due to stockouts, positively impacting profits during the critical seasonal selling periods.

To enable this communication between stores and digital, retailers need a system that aids them in tracking and saving records across channels so that orders can be updated in-store or online. Connecting a variety of sales channels gives retailers an unprecedented view into every point on their supply chain and can help shape sales and promotion strategies.

Too much data, not enough knowledge

Data without analysis provides no insight for retailers to gain useful insights from their transactional and master data, they first need to store, sort, and analyze it. Many retailers are not equipped to efficiently store their data, limiting their ability to draw out insights in a fast and meaningful way. When data is stored, it is often not analyzed effectively, wasting an opportunity to turn the cost of managing data into a profit source. According to a recent IDC report, by 2017, retail companies that take advantage of all their company data can potentially realize an additional $94 billion in revenue over companies that don’t.

How, then, can retailers wade through the data overload? It’s critical that they implement a system that comes with advanced analytics and insight capabilities built in. This allows them to quickly view key performance indicators and drill into data from all channels to gain real insights and take actions. A cloud-enabled platform makes it easy for teams to access up-to-date reports on any device, in any context. This streamlines decision making, enabling retailers to find and respond to trends faster and understand exactly how channels are performing in relation to one another and historical trends.

Disadvantaged sales associates: lack access to customer insights

Consumers rank personalized service and smart recommendations among the factors they value most when shopping in store[vi]. One example from Black Friday 2016 drives this home –16.5% of sales were driven through shopper research sites like RetailMeNot and CNET; a significant increase from last year.[vii] To have well trained and informed sales associates can be a costly and uphill battle. Wages continue to be low for retail workers and turnover is high. Staffing for seasonal surges means that often new staff is added with minimal training. Today, the playing field is stacked against the sales associate. Because they lack quick access to the product information that is available to customers online, it diminishes their ability to have an informed, real-time conversation. To be a leading retailer with best in class service, sales associates should be able to provide value-added personal services by using the information at their fingertips.

With a consolidated management system, retailers can bring their customer and merchandise information together to help employees recommend the right products to the right customers. A connected, mobile POS system can quickly connect customer history, loyalty status, product, and promotional information and provide the targeted insights employees need to have great interactions with informed customers. Joined with advanced machine learning and analytics, cross sell and upsell suggestions can be provided that are targeted to the individual. Instead of using a canned suggestion, this allows the sales associate to provide a more impactful experience for the customer. These connected systems can also generate personalized offers over digital channels so customers experience the same great service online. Personalization, whether in-store or online, can make all the difference – according to Gartner, organizations that incorporate personalization into digital commerce will increase revenue up to 15 percent by 2018.[viii]

Get started today

Microsoft is ready to help retailers with their easily-deployed Dynamics 365 for Retail. Dynamics 365 is a comprehensive omnichannel solution that provides out of the box analytics for every part of your business. Scalable and global, Dynamics 365 can grow with your business with streamlined business processes and cost effective cloud powered infrastructure. The solution is flexible and integrates with existing technology, so it can be deployed with or without an existing POS.

By implementing an end-to-end integrated retail management system, retailers are poised to dramatically increase efficiency and bolster their customer engagements across all channels. Learn how your business can leverage consumer mobile interaction to differentiate and drive customer loyalty.

And if you’re heading to the National Retail Federation’s BIG Show 2017, make sure to visit us in our Microsoft Booth #2803 and see Dynamics 365 for Retail for yourself!

[i]  The New Digital Divide. Deloitte, 2014

[ii] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161126005005/en/Media-Alert-Adobe-Data-Shows-Black-Friday

[iii] Sterling Commerce, an IBM Company, Cross-Channel Brand Interaction: 2010 Consumer Preferences, 2010.

[iv] Accenture, Customer Desires vs. Retailer Capabilities, 2014

[vi] The State of Retail 2016. TimeTrade, 2016

[vii] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161126005005/en/Media-Alert-Adobe-Data-Shows-Black-Friday

[viii] http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2962317

The post How integrating your retail system solves four all-too-common pain points appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.