Tech for Retail

The retail environment today is becoming quite dynamic and complex with the wave of Gen Y consumers who know quite a lot about products and the best deals in the market. Added to this is high product proliferation, rapidly changing consumer priorities and constant popping up of retail outlets in every nook and corner. All this is making it quite a challenge for the retailers to capture their consumer's attention, serve them in the best possible way and retain their loyalty. So retail is learning its lessons in becoming more and more customer-centric, trying to understand each and every customers and gauge them well to serve them better.

Major challenges that retail environment faces
Among the challenges that the retail environment faces include absence of actionable customer information, scalability of the solution, complexity of integrating disparate retail systems, POS reliability and extensibility with end to end back office connectivity, lack of consistent customer driven service levels and staff turnover, integration of data of stores and warehouses at one single place and keeping inventory costs low while making sure the right product mix is available in store to maximize sales.

Technology to resolve these challenges
Many IT solution providers having identified this potential are coming out with solutions to resolve these challenges. Some of the functionality that IT solutions for the retail vertical can provide today are as follows:

-View performance of individual stores or groups of stores

-View performance of individual item category and product groups

-View top selling items, customers and transaction

-Hourly Sales distribution reports that enable viewing how your stores are performing within different periods of day

-Back office functionality in the store and head office
Inventory Management

-Cash Management

-Bar-code Label Printing

-Staff Management including functions to manage allocations, timetabling and time and attendance capture

-Remote purchasing, allowing stores to manage their own purchase as an alternative to centralize purchasing functions.

-Monitoring vendor performance — Retailers can get an overview of how the vendor is performing, his profitability, purchase order fulfillment, discrepancy in receiving quantity and/or quality of goods and invoicing discrepancy, This data can be an important tool for buyers to use when entering vendor negotiations.

-Replenishment — Solutions that are designed to assist retailers to manage and replenish their most significant assets
Localization and standardization of PoS.

DVS launches'Retail Center of Excellence'
Retailers today, need to get a better understanding about the solutions available in the market today and what purposes they resolve. With this purpose in mind, DVS, a solution provider of end to end integrated adaptable business management apps recently launched its "Retail Centre of Excellence"in Gurgaon, India which will be enable businesses of all sizes hands-on insight into usage and application of cutting edge technologies in the retail, real estate and hospitality industries and would showcase an end to end solution roadmap for the same, in line with market demands and delivery.

For decision makers
The Retail Center of Excellence will showcase technologies, industry best practices and do demos of solutions for retail, hospitality and real estate. It will present an opportunity to the industry leaders of the said sectors to experience and be a part of the cutting edge technologies and best practices world wide. It will be a forum where the decision makers can interact with the technology partners and understand from the live demonstration of the sub-vertical scenarios in their respective divisions and bring the best practices in technology to the Indian subcontinent.
They would be advised on IT strategies and solutions roadmap. It would organize thought leadership events to facilitate knowledge and experience sharing which acts as an educative platform for their industry. It would also conduct audits for on-going / completed retail implementations and produce whitepapers on industry best practices and vertical specific fact sheets.

For general public
The Centre shall also remain open to the general public every Wednesday between 2-5 pm which gives them the chance to get familiar with the innovative solutions that are going to change their lives and get closer to the technology.

Sessions and Roadshows across India
In addition to technology, the Center will host bi-monthly Sessions which will focus on and provide solutions to the primary pain areas experienced by various divisions of retail, real estate or hospitality business — from management to IT infrastructure. These sessions and roadshows which will move city to city across India will be paneled by some pioneers in the industry who are supporting this educative initiative.