To keep pace with growing consumer expectations, retailers must be equipped with modern order management systems that greatly expand their fulfillment capabilities. However, many still lag behind.
By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, motivating many retailers to turn to IT digital transformation technologies like hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies can help retailers prepare for dramatic changes in buyer behaviors and support a more flexible, reliable, secure, scalable, and resilient in-store infrastructure.
Guest Column |
By Amr Farahat, Washington University in St. Louis
If retailers supply more product than there is demand for, they are left with excess inventory, which ties up capital and leads to obsolescence. Too little supply results in lost sales and weakens customer retention.
Consumers around the globe are scanning products using their smartphones to learn more about what they want to buy — or what they’ve just purchased. Some manufacturers have responded by adding QR codes and secondary bar codes on packages that connect consumers to more product information. Not only do these extra codes take up valuable label “real estate,” but they may not even contain standardized product identifiers such as UPCs, causing confusion when scanning at point of sale checkout counters.
