Retail

Retailers must manage an increasingly complex portfolio of industry-specific systems—planning, procurement, logistics, and point- of- sale applications—as well as core applications that provide customer service, financial, and human resources capabilities. Unfortunately, most retail applications are one-time implementations residing on disparate systems that cannot readily interoperate. As a result, neither functionality nor data are integrated, rendering manual workarounds and data duplication as the norm. In an industry where competition is increasingly intense, it is critical that IT investments enhance store operations and selling capabilities, and that the shopping experience of customers be differentiated, no matter which channel they opt to use.

It is fast becoming clear to retailers that in order to improve in-store operations and to realize greater efficiencies in their supply chain, application silos must be integrated. The cost of manual processes, limited insight into operations, and information redundancies is simply too high not to take action. At the same time, retailers do not want to revamp their entire IT infrastructure or invest in new capital expenditures if the return on investment is too far into the future or insufficiently high. What is needed is an approach to integration that leverages existing IT assets, while at the same time realizing a faster time- to- value.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to integrating IT resources that can enable you to leverage existing assets, while at the same time building an infrastructure that can rapidly respond to business challenges and deliver new dynamic applications. The SOA approach can help free application functionality from its underlying architecture, and make existing and new services available for consumption over the network.

Microsoft has a comprehensive SOA offering that:

• Provides developers, architects and IT professionals with the tools, technologies, framework and guidance for building and maintaining SOA solutions.
• Provides business users with personal productivity software that can help your organization increase productivity, lower costs, and promote organizational agility by streamlining and optimizing business processes.

With large businesses competing in almost every market space, nearly all retailers are experiencing extremely intense competition. Increasingly, retailers are seeing the key to greater competitiveness is to shift from a product-centric approach to a customer-centric approach. Such a shift means that the retail industry must meet the challenge of incorporating customer demand into the product planning and replenishment processes. A seamless customer experience can both lower organizational operating costs and improve customer retention. This means that retailers need to:

• Understand customer buying behaviors and preferences.
• Effectively communicate those needs with suppliers and manufacturers during product development.
• Quickly respond to changing market conditions during the sales and distribution phase.

The benefits of a rapid response to changing market conditions and customer demand are clear: increased customer satisfaction, decreased costs, and the reduction of inventory overstock. Getting there, however, begins with deploying a supporting technological framework that can integrate and automate information transfer across both back-end systems and the supply chain.

Business Process Management (BPM) solutions integrate across legacy systems and trading partners, as well as provide visibility into retail processes, helping organizations to obtain comprehensive real-time business intelligence. The best BPM software helps business users achieve these goals using tools that are intuitive and easy- to- use, and yet are powerful enough to achieve flexible and robust business solutions.