|
A community of people who love to write
The easiest domain name (Note the .ORG) - Absolutely Free! |
Home | Submit Articles | Login |
| ALL Categories | HEALTH | EDUCATION | FINANCE | TECH | WOMEN | ENTERTAINMENT | TRAVEL | |||
IT in Retailing with Indian Perspective. Software investment in Retail Industry.BY: sonu | Category: Technology and Computers | Post Date: 2008-09-25
Retailing growth has demanded IT deployment to broaden its arena and overcome challenges namely Business Optimization, increasing SCM efficiency, innovating shopping experience and other manual limitations. Introducing Retailing in Current Scenario With time the Indian markets are becoming inundated with numerous dispersed firms, companies that demands to lead with an extra mile to gain a competitive edge over their competitors for whom Information Technology has become a critical medium. Classifications of IT investments in Retailing based on the need / value. • Improving efficiency of Supply Chain • Improving the Shopping experience • Business Optimization Improving efficiency of Supply Chain Supply chain improvement a critical Retailing investment comprises implementing ERP packages, forecasting tools, and others. The leading manufacturer-retailer Madura Garments in one of the interactions, after the implementation of the SAP ERP package, company could easily measure the success of the implementation by certain related indicators. Improving the shopping experience & Business Optimization These investments comprises the value added services being provided by disperse retailers like the CRM packages by firms to add value to their existing products. These types of investments may turn out most difficult to measure of all especially if the company lacks experience in using customer data to increase customer profitability. An instance that can be referred is Fabmall's e-commerce website tracking customer preferences and built-in business intelligence also sending suggestions to customers based on their earlier purchases. Critical Avenues for IT Investment Customer relationship management:Indian retailers are aggressively investing in Customer Relationship Management Solution for retaining, acquiring customers, brand management, to analyze consumer-buying behaviour, buying patterns of 'loyalty cardholders', integration of multi-channel sales and others. Few feasible CRM solution packages are namely Talisma, Siebel, SAP, Retek CRM and Sales Logix. Retailers like Pantaloon, Café Coffee Day, Barista, Shoppers Stop are some to deploy referred CRM packages. Business Intelligence tools These comprises tools namely Data warehousing, data mining, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) facilitating a wealth of information in terms of sales and behavioral analysis to retailers. Business Intelligence tools are identified to be very versatile that analyze sales data from the PoS, determines trend of sales for the categories and sub-categories of merchandise sold from disperse stores that enable the retailers to understand the frequency of sale, geographical spread of sales, types of sold merchandise and thus provide 'what if' analysis specially for projected sales and price changes . This would lead to increase in sales. RFID Currently RFID is profitably being used in retail firms of developed countries primarily in two sections namely in supply chain, wearhouses and Retail front. It ensures individual articles tagged by RFID enables quick billing and to ensure automated stock keeping. B2B software Business to business solutions usually implemented either through existing packages like C-ME, SOA or custom made solutions are used by large retailers and manufacturer-retailers Having a secure and stable network is a prerequisite for implementing B2B. This B2B site would entail confirming vendors, suppliers and other channel partners to send the necessary information through the network that in turn ensures reduced costs and availability of merchandise at the stores. Business Optimization software Product pricing software: Significant prospects of profitability can be achieved with the advent of sophisticated price optimization / revenue management techniques offer. Currently two US-based software product vendors Demand Tech and Khimetrics have come up with products to optimize the prices of individual products. India will introduce such products in the coming years as retailers have started understanding the features of the products and their deployment in pricing decision-making. Merchandise optimization software Software applications though at nascent stages are being developed to apply sophisticated data processing techniques to existing inventory and sales data and thus accurately determine future patterns of supply and demand at each item and store level. Mobile computing Mobile computing has facilitated employees in tracking the inventory and provided customers an innovative shopping experience through integration of PDAs in individual shopping carts that would provide information on the products. This use have optimized inefficiencies in inventory and supply chain sections and lead to cost minimization. A similar WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)-enabled mobile phones are catching attention today in Retailing sectors. Conclusion CRM solution, Business Intelligence Tools, B2B software, RFID, Business Optimization software and ERP are some of the popular technological avenues for explosive Retailing that has identified IT as critical tool in its scenario. In India IT tools are being implemented in the supply chain that is commonly fraught with inefficiencies like about 50% of the production is often lost before reaching the targeted consumers specially in perishable goods market. Unless these manual problems are solved no IT solution could prove to be much effective. Article Source: http://www.saching.com About Author / Additional Info: The above information presented has been compiled by my partner and me. We have tried to include every possible and relevant information that could convince the reader that IT does play a major role in Retailing and IT still has a scope to grow further. Additional Articles: * INCREASE COMPUTER PERFORMANCE * How to write a Killer Article * Where to buy the best dogs when they are up for sale * What needs to be done before joining an affiliate marketing program. * Selecting a right career Does this article violate or infringe on your copyright ? It is a violation of our terms for authors to submit content which they did not write and claim it as their own. If this article infringes on your copyrights, then use our Contact us form with the detailed proof of infringement along with the offending article's title, URL and writer name. If you do not hear back from us then contact us again in another 10 days. Thank you. Comments on this article: (0 comments so far) * Additional comments are now closed for this article *
Article Views: 2622 
Copyright © 2010 saching.com - Do not copy articles from this website. Important Disclaimer: All articles on this website are for general information only and is not a professional or experts advice. We do not own any responsibility for correctness or authenticity of the information presented in this article, or any loss or injury resulting from it. We do not endorse these articles, we are neither affiliated with the authors of these articles nor responsible for their content. Please see our disclaimer section for complete terms. |
| Home | Disclaimer | Xhtml |