Customers in the Retail domain now are expecting to interact with retailers at various touchpoints and expect a state of art experience online. With customers advancing to new technologies the challenge for the industry is to adopt solutions that can not only address the consumer needs but also reduce overall investments on IT infrastructure in a long term.
In the retail industry customers have been driving the IT strategy with more users demanding a multichannel accessibility to the retailer. Website users and online purchases are the metrics used to measure effectiveness, and so the industry demands robust business intelligence and analytics, cross-channel shopping experiences, service delivery etc. As users are moving into social media retailers also need to establish their presence and reach out directly to their customers be it through mobile devices or applications. CIGNEX Datamatics can help the retail industry to be customer ready and can build solutions and applications to “go online and prosper”
- Content Solutions for Retail: Vendor Management is a key activity in the retail industry as part of the supply chain where purchase orders are generated and shipped. Also Contract Lifecycle Management that helps address consistency and process to the contract phases. CIGNEX Datamatics provides retail customer with content solutions that help them to automate the order process.
- Portals for Retail: Retail industry could provide an intranet with product information, pricing details, and a market atmosphere. Features like message boards, blogs, and chat can be used to facilitate collaboration and discussions of internal strategy to market products online. Portals can also provide a better user interface to the vendors to easily submit invoices rather than deal with emails systems. Organizations can also build web portals with rich UI and functional capabilities that provide users a comfortable atmosphere to understand the organizations and its product offerings
- E-Commerce for Retail: With retail organizations turning online, the challenge is more than just offering products online. It is providing customers an environment to compare products with similar offerings or selecting a shipment company of the customer’s choice. With retail coming online companies focus more on international audiences and they must consider portals in multiple languages. CIGNEX Datamatics e-commerce portals provide payment integration, catalog management, product browsing, m-commerce, and multi-lingual features within the portal. The retailer can use the analytics and reporting capabilities to track user activity and plan their marketing activities.
- Big Data for Retail: Big Data Solutions can provide a significant advantage for the retail industry in inventory management, merchandising and optimization, price comparison services etc. The simplest use case is a manager having differential pricing available through a dashboard-like application on a day-to-day level based on various geographic regions enabling better decision making. Retail companies have established their presence on social media channels over the years and using Big Data they can run behavioral analysis towards a product they released in the market.
- Managed Cloud Services for Retail: Currently the retail industry is looking for opportunities that can reduce IT investments and manage cloud services on a scalable and secure platform which prevents them from committing excessive budget towards the infrastructure.
