The retail omni market will produce tremendous amounts of data as a matter of course from expanded consumer and retail partner utilization. The data produced as a result of the online shopping and purchasing consumer practices will bring a tremendous level of clarity and predictive capabilities to the retailer, if they take the the time and make the effort required to collect the data to perform the analytics. The information available from the online channel is tremendous both in value to the retailer and their partners and the volume of data produced for anlaysls. This does require a focused strategy and effort to define the data capture volume and storage to support the current and potential analysis requirements to produce the value. This effort will be a struggle at first however the potential return will continue to increase in value as the analysis matures.
The initial struggle for retailers and especially large legacy retailers is to split their focus between the efforts to react to consumer demands that are increasing in velocity and level of disruption and the efforts to identify and build the infrastructure to collect and then analyze the data produced from the omni market shopping, purchasing and communication efforts. Retailers are first struggling with understanding and reacting to the changing consumer demands because of the types of change to infrastructure and capabilities required by the retailers. The large legacy retailers have taken a path of reacting to the changing demands and delivery of these demands by large and difficult initiatives that involve major development, acquisition and integration of new companies and the services the provide or many times both of these requirements. Adding another initiative requiring focus and a great deal of effort and investment to collect the enormous amounts of data and develop the analysis tools to mine the data is in itself another major initiative that will also potentially disrupt their omni market capabilities.
Legacy retailers currently seems to be reacting to consumer and industry actions and reactions by chasing industry developments an acquisition of software tools and service providers to increase their omni market capabilities. This is a perfectly acceptable practice to quickly improve their portfolio of capabilities to me consumer and market demands. This strategy, in my opinion, cannot be sustained over a long period of time and these same legacy retailers must focus on communication and collaboration practices with consumers and their extended partners to get ahead of this curve and begin to define trends early. This is the key; analysis capabilities and the amounts and types of data to support trending predictive analysis to allow the retailers so quickly and efficiently identify potential trends and react to take advantage of these trends.
And now for the audience participation portion of the show…
ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors. How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience? Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes. In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas. How can you support these continuously changing requirements?
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