Similar to how retailers are revamping the role of brick and mortar stores, to enhance and personalize the instore experience, the operations and assets supporting the retail business are transforming as well. Retailers are using IT solutions to ensure critical business uptime, while streamlining and augmenting traditional workflows – what is referred to as achieving Operational Excellence in Retail.
For both internal and customer-facing environments, retailers require continuous support and uptime of all critical business assets and operations, in addition to identifying strategic ways to optimize traditional workflows that result in greater efficiencies, lower costs, and improved customer outcomes. Retail business cannot afford to see a drop in service – especially during peak seasons and peak business hours – that would result in loss of revenue and/or a poor customer experience. Equally important, operational excellence allows retailers to embrace digital transformation and innovation by ‘working smarter,’ or offloading routine, everyday tasks via automation.
Maintaining Critical Uptime of all Operations Retailers and their supporting operations – including the assets, staff, devices, and systems responsible for running the business – cannot afford a compromise or drop in service. This includes customer-facing environments like brick and mortar stores, and back-of-house environments like warehouses, distribution centers, and loading docks. The smooth and secure upkeep of these environments poses significant challenges, and the business’ IT network solution has an indispensable role in this task. For guest-facing, in-store deployments the pressure to deliver an enhanced, personalized shopping experience has only increased with the rise of online retailers. This includes providing reliable Wi-Fi, with seamless mobile onboarding and roaming, and a central management platform to ensure the network is properly maintained and secured – in many cases, for a large number of distributed locations. The back-of-house side of the businesses comprises of extensive storage and shipping facilities that require complete coverage and capacity despite their massive, cavernous environments. They also extend outdoors, have a range of temperatures, and support a diverse set of in-house applications and devices.
Complete Security, Visibility, Tracking of all
Inventory and Assets
Retailers must be able to successfully understand and control
business inventory and its supporting assets, and then
document these processes to identify greater efficiencies for
improved outcomes and cost-savings. If a business doesn’t
have detailed, real-time visibility into available inventory at
a given location it can strain a business’ sales and/or impact
customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the retail supply chain
often needs to track and manage inventory from multiple
warehouses, stores, or locations - a difficult task especially if
the business systems aren’t centrally connected.
Security is a major consideration and a potential point
of weakness for business operations as well. Innovative
technologies like IoT has compelling benefits for a retailer’s
operational assets and their supporting systems, but with
more and more connected (and unknown) users, devices, and
‘things’ in these environments, it creates more vulnerability for
the business and its customers. Retailers must not only see
who and what are in their environments, they must also be
able to securely enable and protect against them too.
Improving Operational Efficiency through
Automation and Data Analytics
Maintaining uptime is critical for retailers, but that doesn’t
mean IT staff and their budgets need to be weighed down
by burdensome, day-to-day network administration and
troubleshooting. In fact, recent industry reports indicate
that most retail enterprises spend 80% of their IT budgets
"keeping the lights on," and only 20% on innovation projects.
To combat this dynamic, retailers are now employing
automation in their environments via artificial intelligence
and machine learning, allowing them to offload mundane,
day-to-day administrative tasks. Companies are also turning
to predicative analytics, which optimize and make advanced
forecasts about the supply chain and customer behaviors, by
reading algorithms on both current and historical datasets to
guide future decisions, and to free up valuable time, budget,
and mindshare for more innovative projects.
Flexibility, Adaptability, and Scalability for an
Evolving Business
Retailers today must scale relationships and collaboration
through building a network of API-driven, interconnected
ecosystems. Connections between partners, employees
and even competitors are built into ecosystems that
can unlock value for all; a network solution that easily
interoperates with other strategic platforms is required to
meet all these needs.
Retail businesses require digital platforms that are
flexible and adaptable, engineered to scale from the
smallest networks to the largest geographically dispersed
deployments. The architecture should be tailored to the
specific needs of the organization, and retailers may need to
leverage a variety of network configurations: cloud-based, on
premise, or a mixture of both. As the business and its physical
environments evolve, it’s essential retailers avoid locking
into one architecture or deployment model, so new tools or
systems are integrated into the business without a drop in
critical service and keeping a consistent user experience.
Enhancing and Empowering the Role of the
Physical Workforce
Similar to how the systems and processes powering the
organization’s operations are shifting, retailer’s supporting
staff are transforming as well. Retail businesses are now
establishing high-performing digital workplaces, by
leveraging existing and emerging technologies to improve
and expand the role of supporting staff. This includes every
aspect of the business, from in-store sales associates, to
warehouse staff, to connected devices and assets.
With Extreme’s purpose-built networking solutions, retailers can achieve Operational Excellence through the support and guaranteed uptime of all critical business assets and operations, while strategically optimizing traditional work flows that result in greater efficiencies, lower costs, and improved customer outcomes.
