How to Stay Competitive in Retail and Accelerate Business Growth?

The rise of ecommerce has been a major factor in the shift towards digital in retail with the high street increasingly becoming a less regular destination for consumers. Customers have come to expect a superior experience across multiple channels (including in-store). Maximizing customer insights requires unifying your data sources across the end-to-end buyer journey to create a holistic view of the customer.

Based on this 360-view of customers data analytics enables retailers to transform and elevate the shopping experience to build stronger relationships across all touchpoints of the customer journey. Only if the supply chain is based on the real-time data across the ecosystem, it can truly become agile and sustainable. This allows a retailer to identify any issues and to optimize the supply chain performance. A recent example of supply chain agility is the ‘click and collect’ delivery method during the pandemic.

Besides smart data, competitiveness in retail requires the empowerment of the workforce. The workforce needs technology and tools that help to improve customer satisfaction, productivity, and collaboration.

Critical success factors for innovation and competitiveness

As a result of the ongoing digitization of retail much more data is generated. Meanwhile the risk posed by cyberthreats has grown. Inflexible, obsolete hardware and systems are being stretched, draining valuable resources away from other parts of the business.

To provide the agility retailers now need, systems and workflows need to be adapted and upgraded so they can harness innovative solutions and exploit technology to give them a competitive edge. Technology has a crucial role to play with data analytics, machine learning, AI-infused solutions, and large-scale data processing. Tech solutions enable retailers to unlock data and create new business opportunities, remodel the shopping experience, optimise store space, introduce new service lines, and increase margins significantly.

How TCS and Microsoft can help retailers

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a Microsoft Gold Partner and Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Service Partner, recognized for its expertise in delivering the highest quality of service on Azure. It offers a comprehensive set of end-to-end services and intellectual property such as TCS Optumera™, its award-winning AI-powered retail optimization platform.

TCS Optumera™ is an award-winning AI-powered retail strategic intelligence platform that enables retailers to seamlessly orchestrate data across the retail value chain, and make optimized space, assortment, price, promotion, markdown, and supply chain decisions in an integrated manner. With integrated, hyper-localized, always-on optimization, the platform enables retailers to make key business processes autonomous and unlock exponential value. Retailers can use Optumera to help reimagine their merchandising strategy – for example, to add more counters in stores and rationalising product lines. This requires the ability to make strategic, integrated merchandising decisions in real time, based on customer and business data. This can include identifying stores in which to introduce new concepts, optimising shelf space to make way for new product lines and services and tailoring the product mix for local customer preferences.

“Petco is re-imagining our merchandising strategy leveraging TCS Optumera, to support a seamless omni-channel shopping experience for our customers,” said Mike Nuzzo, Chief Operating Officer, Petco. “Optumera is expertly designed to help enhance the speed of critical merchandising decisions, like floor space and assortment mix, to improve the overall customer experience.”

Source: Petco Selects TCS Optumera to Drive its Intelligent Merchandising Strategy (martechseries.com)

The advanced data science capabilities of Optumera consider thousands of key factors that influence sales, helping retailers make customer-centric merchandising decisions and grow their business. Take Optumera Omnichannel Assortment Optimization solution, which helps to rationalise SKUs with high demand and identify a local product mix based on demographics. This helps retailers as they remodel stores, optimise store space, and introduce new service lines. Leading retailers have seen 3-5% increase in sales and profitability, 30%- 50% reduction in time spent, execute 5x more strategies and 20-30% reduction in costs by leveraging AI in their core business processes.