Coordinating Retail Touchpoints

It would be nearly impossible for any retailer to control the touchpoints across the retail omni market without the use of some kind of software control center or control tower to provide the means to track and trace th activities.  This control tower would provide the means to coordinate the touchpoints into a cohesive process and view to allow the retailer to track and trace activities through interactions and data updates along the consumer shopping process in the retail omni market and especially in the online channel where every move and action of the consumer can be tracked and traced.  This control tower will require an enormous amount of data to provide the means necessary to trace and coordinate the consumer and external supply chain partner activities in addition to input to creating and encouraging new touch points throughout the retail omni market.

The retail omni market will provide the opportunities to collect immense amounts of data through the online channels and now with the expansion and growth of mobile technology and location aware technologies the opportunities to collect additional consumer shopping data in the brick and mortar stores in also increasing dramatically.  This is the area where the growth will occur along with the greatest return in value for the data of from the consumer brick and mortar shopping. The technology is available and used by other technology leaders such as Google to identify smartphone locations and provide suggestions for activities and stores in the vicinity and there is no reason that retailers should not be using this same technology to connect with consumers in the store and in the mall to provide shopping suggestions or alerts.  

Retailers must overcome their cultural hesitation to lead the technology development and create these new means to interact with consumers to increase the engagement and collaborative interaction with consumers.  Consumers are using social technology to help with their shopping selection and purchasing and these same consumers would also welcome the opportunity to engage and interact with the retailer in their brick and mortar shopping.  The whole objective of the retail omni market is to provide one cohesive shopping experience with the consumer and currently the greatest level of cohesiveness is in the online or eCommerce channel. The brick and mortar channel has been utilized as a delivery channel for the eCommerce channel or a self standing outlet with no real cohesive touchpoints to the eCommerce channel.  This is the next frontier of consumer collaboration and interaction.

As we have seen over the last few years there is absolutely no time for retailers to hesitate in supporting the demands of the consumer because the demands and changes come in increasing waves of change.  Retailers must develop touch points for direct interaction with both consumers and their supply chain partners in order to help them to sense and respond to the changing demands in a manner the can be coordinated not only across the retail omni market but also across the entire supply chain because the changes encountered in the retail market reverberate across the entire extended supply chain.

Consumer Retail Touchpoints

Consumer Retail Touchpoints

Consumers have used the technology available to them to increase the ways they can shop and purchase retail products and this increase has dramatically increased the number of consumer touchpoints in the retail marketplace.  This can be disconcerting to the planning and forecasting for retailers because it requires an awareness and planning to support the consumer demands. This is a new practice for retailers and now retailers must take the time and the effort to understand, react and support these changing demands.  There is a huge benefit to supporting and encouraging increased touchpoints; increased touches with the consumer provides an opportunity to increase the personal relationship with the consumers and this new omni market requires retailers to develop and increase the relationship with consumers to survive.

A strategy for support of the touchpoints begins with first a focus on collaboration and engagement of the consumer.  The touchpoints into the retail marketplace will increase and develop through the collaboration and engagement with consumers and as a result, these touchpoints will increase the reasons for consumers to return over and over to the retailer creating a habit.  This habit is the objective for retailers and the reason for the number of touchpoints because the more times the consumer returns and the more opportunities, or touchpoints, the consumer can use to interact with the retailer the greater the sales for the retailer.  It is now the retailers opportunity to understand and develop these touchpoints through collaboration and engagement of the consumers.

Retailers have been developing touchpoints over the years, such as email distributions and subscriptions and rewards programs, it is time now to take it up a notch and tie things together through location based engagement with consumers.  Location based activities are available from many apps and services, for instance when I travel Google provides me with maps of every airport when I land. Google has extended this to maps and links to retailer websites at malls as well and some retailers have added location awareness to their mobile apps to allow them to provide sales alerts.  

These changes though don’t just happen, they require commitment to the process and increased collaboration and engagement not only with consumers but also with the entire extended supply chain partners.  This extended engagement allows retailers to truly support the growing touchpoints demanded by consumers and as a result will also allow retailers to improve and increase the consumer relationships to encourage consumer returns to this extended market place.  This is the holy grail of retail; the encouragement of consumers to return over and over again.

The technology available to consumers now provides the ability to quickly and easily connect to any retailer to shop from any location and any time.  This technology allows consumers to shop at multiple retailers for the same product simultaneously. In the past, retailers have attempted to stop these practices, especially in the brick and mortar environment, and these have always backfired.  This leads now to the need for retailers to accept and encourage the touchpoints to give them an opportunity to develop the consumer relationship and provide them with a reason to return and complete the purchase. Retail is about relationships and these touchpoints provide a means to develop the relationship and the reason for consumers to return over and over.

Omni Market Discontinuous Change

The retail omni market is experiencing a series of disruptions that are driven by a series of discontinuous changes across the marketplace and the partners supporting the marketplace.  The fallout from these disruptions can be seen in lost market share and a series of legacy retailer failures that seem to be quickening as a result of the quickening series of disruptions.  Retailers must first connect with their partners and second must embrace a continuous change model that includes a strong evaluation of the changing market to drive the change model. Without this discontinuous change model in place it really does not matter that the partners in the extended supply chain are connected and collaborative, these partners must add the ability to sense and respond to the change by implementing a robust continuous change model.

This continuous change model must be robust and most importantly supported and encouraged by  senior management as a critical tool to support strategic planning. It is critical to the success of the organization and their success in this new retail omni market model to have a process in place that provides a sense and respond capability to guide and direct changes to their capabilities and even partnerships.  Having the most flexible and robust infrastructure will not help a retailer if they are not able to recognize change requirements and respond to the changes quickly and efficiently.

Acquisition of companies to support new capabilities will allow the legacy retailers gain traction in the retail omni market now and most importantly these acquisitions should be viewed as a way to quicken the culture change that will allow these retailers to sense and respond more quickly and efficiently to changes in the future.  The most important thing to remember is that these new capabilities and practices are not a ‘once and done’ transaction, they are a means to move the needle on the implementation of the continuous change model that is required to support the level of discontinuous change driven by consumers in this omni market model.

These legacy retailers must also understand that the velocity of change will only increase and for this reason these retailers must be focusing now on their processes and technology infrastructure framework to allow them to support the increasing velocity of change.  This will not preclude acquisition to address new capabilities, however, the acquisition process to identify and come to agreement must also quicken in order to support the market demands.

One important aspect to take into account with this discussion on omni market discontinuous change is the increasing importance in developing strong partnerships with all members across the the extended supply chain.  The point is that retailers themselves should no longer be viewed as the key aspect of the marketplace. They can no longer control the entire relationship with the consumer as a result of the omni market changes and interactions between consumers and other partners in the supply chain.  As an example the consumer reaction to the retailer will be poor if their eCommerce purchase was delivered damaged. It is important to realize that the consumer now has so many touch point in the retail omni market and the importance of collaboration across the entire supply chain cannot be overplayed in level of importance.

Connected Retail Supply Chain

The retail supply chain must be more connected now than ever to support the changing demands of the extended supply chain from suppliers to consumers.  This connectivity should be loosely coupled in order to ensure simplicity of connection and also flexibility in changing to meet new demands. This is important because it provide the flexibility to add and change partners across the supply chain quickly and efficiently as demands change while providing the framework to share and collaborate efficiently and quickly.  The ability to quickly and efficiently collaborate is extremely important in the retail marketplace and this demand for speed of turn around will only increase going forward. This is the value provided by a loosely coupled framework and this is also why it is so important to build this flexible framework as a foundation to supporting the new retail omni market.

Unfortunately there are no real hard and fast rules to this connectivity and the partners must, to a certain extent, feel out the rules as they go along.  These must start with guidelines of the types of information and integration points in the market that are most beneficial to share. The key benefit of the loosely coupled framework is the ability of this framework to change and grow to support the changing demands of the market.  This is a very important aspect that will allow, and support, an efficient continuous change model to support the changing demands of all partners across the extended supply chain network.

The loosely coupled integration model has been a standard practice in much of the extended supply chain for quite some time, for instance going back to the EDI model of standard integration message formats shared with partners in the extended supply chain.  The Internet and growth and acceptance of XML has all but eliminated the need for the EDI Value Added Network now and this dramatically expands the opportunities to partner across the extended supply chain with small and large partners. This provides great opportunities to expand collaboration and engagement quickly across the partners with very low cost of entry making this practice almost the price of admission to the market now.  There are really no other types of tools or practices that bring the same impact or capabilities to the supply chain and this is very important to the retail omni market to allow the partners to quickly meet new demands from the marketplace.

The technology required to support the loosely coupled framework is a very low cost of entry with a very high return based on the results and potential of the technology and the framework.  This simplified platform framework allows the partners in the extended supply chain to quickly and efficiently react to the changes and most importantly the velocity of changes experienced in retail omni market.  This is especially important as the velocity of changing demands increases the disruption in the market.

Retail Shopping Framework

Consumers have changed the way they shop and purchase and retailers must react and adjust to these consumer changes now in a manner that understands this is only the beginning and a new framework is required to support omni market retail simultaneously across all channels.  Consumers are not going to wait for retailers to catch up to their demands because these consumers have the ability and imagination to use the social networking tools at hand in combination with search and purchasing tools to support their demands. Retailers now must develop a shopping framework that provides the integration and flexibility to support the increasing velocity of change along with the tools and practices to sense and respond to these changes.  Velocity and flexibility are the guidewords of today and there is no time to hesitate while the changes continue in waves across the industry.

The natural tendency of retailers to follow the lead of others is no longer supportable because the velocity of change has quickened to such a pace that there is no time to follow the lead of others.  On the other hand it is no longer viable for retailers to go it alone, they must collaborate with other retailers and the partners that support their retail omni market needs. Collaboration is the new key to success in this marketplace and all partners supporting the market must engage and collaborate to meet the consumer needs in the most efficient manner for all partners across the supply chain.  Amazon started a revolution in the retail market and the echos are spreading across the marketplace in waves of disruption. Many retailers now have recognized they must change and they are starting to make course corrections and acquisitions to react and support the changing consumer demands.

The introduction and capabilities social network practices in the retail marketplace have driven the change and especially the velocity of these changes.  Consumers are formidable collaborators and embrace the capabilities and practices to improve their shopping and purchasing practices. These are the changes that are driving the market disruption and there is no hint that consumers will slow in their drive for improvements and change.  It is no longer necessary for consumers to wait for their demands to be met by retailers. Consumers are using the mobile tools and network capabilities now to create their own shopping frameworks and retailers must recognize that they must engage and support this framework in order to survive.

Consumers will not wait for retailers to catch up and the statistics of retailers unable to react to the changing marketplace are piling up.  Retailers must accept these changes and engage to integrate into the retail shopping framework utilized by consumers to support their shopping and purchasing.

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?

Relationship Framework Implementation

Retail omni market practices are based on relationships and collaboration across the entire market chain requiring a combination of flexible and robust practices and tools to support these practices.  This framework requires a focus on process and collaboration rather than any tool or even set of tools in particular. This can be a very difficult lift because it requires a focus on process and collaboration first and then a focus on tools and technology second.  This relationship framework requires a level of understanding and collaboration practices across the retail market network that can be difficult to maintain and the framework implementation requires a robust collaboration practice at a culture level across the network.  The process framework of collaboration and engagement must be developed in order to deliver the sense and respond capabilities that will then utilize the technology tools and platforms to deliver.

The market partners must remember that the focus should be based on process to develop sense and respond practices and when this is done the tools and technology can be identified to support the process.  This is a challenge now because the velocity of change demands a velocity of response from the market partners and this velocity of response has been reactionary rather than coordinated. Every partner in the market now has capabilities in market features and functionality to support increased partner collaboration and the reaction of the larger partners in this market has been a focus on acquisition of these partners to realize the capabilities they have developed and therefore improve their ability to react to market change.

The velocity of change is a key business factor in development and implementation of a relationship framework and this must remain a key factor in the development and implementation of this framework.  The tools will come and go in this environment and this drives a key business requirement for the relationship framework to design a flexible and robust foundation for the framework that supports the future ability to add and remove tools as the factors changes and the tools change and improve.  

This requires a difference in the culture of the design and delivery of the relationship framework for all partners involved and this change includes a change in the culture to embrace robust collaborative sense and respond capabilities to identify and implement not only changes to the relationship framework and tools related to the framework, it also requires change to the development and implementation new business capabilities.  The partners must not lose site of the fact that the strategic goal of the relationship framework is improved ability to sense and respond to the changes and the velocity of these changes in the most efficient manner.

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?

Marketplace Relationship Framework

Technologies and capabilities are changing so quickly now that the retail omni marketplace partners must focus on developing and maintaining a robust and flexible framework that can incorporation changing technologies and tools efficiently and quickly.  The marketplace must support change in a continuous and efficient manner that can respond to change demands when they are identified without a great deal of effort, especially from an integration perspective. It has become abundantly clear in the recent years that the rate of change is quickening and that the incremental change introduced at this quickening velocity will soon create a revolution in demands.  The omni market must introduce and maintain a framework and collaboration capabilities that eliminates the friction and delays in meeting the changing demands.

I am convinced that market ‘revolution’ occurs when the level of incremental change pushes the market over the cliff of a major market disruption.  This disruption occurs as a surprise only to the participants and partners in the marketplace that have not focused on meeting the velocity of change due to either lack of funding for the change, lack of ability to internalize and support the change, or finally an unwillingness to change.  The real disruption then occurs for the participants that are not maintaining and reacting to the change in the marketplace and in this situation when the disruption occurs it really doesn’t matter the reason why participants cannot meet the change, it only matters that they cannot meet the change.

This marketplace sense and respond framework can be relatively straightforward to put into place in a manner that provides both the early warning sensing and the flexible framework to support the change.  This is all very straightforward when you come down to it because the technology capabilities are just as available to participants across the board. The difficulty in this comes from the work required by the retailers, carriers and suppliers to support the integration to their back office financial and operational systems and functionality.  This does not mean however that these requirements for this relationship sense and respond framework should be ignored just because it's hard to develop, it simply means that the participants need to put a program in place both internally and across their partner network to put a framework in place to support these requirements.

All of this does not change the level of importance for recognizing and implementing a relationship framework that can provide the tools to sense and then the framework to support a quick response to the demands.  The alternative is to slowing lose market share until the level of change reaches the point of disruption and then the pace of disruption and loss increases. This is when these marketplace partners that have been either reluctant or unable to meet the changing demands will fall by the wayside to either fail or fall into a niche that prolongs the eventual demise.  

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?

Social Marketplace Relationships

Retail marketing is all about the relationship across the entire end-to-end chain and with the steady march of technology and consumer demands changing the marketplace this relationship can be very difficult to maintain.  These relationships are expanding across the supply chain to include consumers, retailers and suppliers in a decentralized manner that supports the distributed nature of the participants and the technologies. This expansion across the supply chain network is based on the social technologies along with the integration of mobile and IOT technologies to complete and maintain the linkage.  The goal of these efforts is building collaborative relationships across the entire chain to share and maintain the flow and use of information.

I think that one of the most promising aspects of these technology developments is the inclusion and extension of transportation and carrier information integration into the relationship equation.  This is the next wave of consumer collaboration as a direct result of the expansion of the retail omni market and the consumer embrace of technologies. This, like other developments in consumer collaboration, has been driven by the demands and the imagination of consumers for supply chain carriers to share and coordinate deliveries of their eCommerce purchases.  Parcel carriers have provided tracking capabilities for a long time, this is nothing new, the new developments are push notifications and the abilities to redirect the deliveries based on changing consumer needs.

Suppliers and resellers in the retail marketplace have demanded traceability for deliveries for a long time and the traceability practices and capabilities have been improving for a long time.  These carriers have taken advantage of the growth and improvements in wireless and mobile technologies just the same as consumers have and these logistics partners are also embracing these technologies, and adding IoT technologies and capabilities to improve their services and meet the consumer demands.

Consumers are at the center of control of the social marketplace and they are demanding flexibility and creativity in their shopping, purchasing and delivery of goods and services.  These technologies allow relationships and new, or expanded, services to be quickly and efficiently created to support demands. This social marketplace will only expand in demands and reach across all aspects and relationships between consumers and the partners that deliver goods and services.  The partners delivering goods and services now must focus on a flexible and robust foundation that supports collaboration and change in order to meet the changing demands. This will be the key challenge and during this wave of development and expansion there will be a great deal of fall out from the legacy partner marketplace.  We are already seeing the fall out with legacy retailers quickly falling by the wayside because the market and their customer demands changed while the retailer either did not recognize or could not meet the changing demands.

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?

Social Supply Chain Technology

Advanced technology such as IoT is converging in the extended supply chain space as a social supply chain demands increase as a means to support the extended partners in meeting changing consumer and partner demands.  This expansion of the social supply chain is really a natural progression of the changes that are rocking the retail marketplace and, again similar to the omni market retail development, the result of an evolution of technology expansion and capabilities in the supply chain that has reached the point of disruption.  The reasons for the growth and expansion of of the social supply chain have been growing for quite some time as a result of shortening product life cycles combined with the growth in demand in addition to the growth of security and safety concerns pushing the limit and increased velocity of change in the supply chain.  

The supply chain has been dependant of advanced technology capabilities for a long time now that was first driven by the expansion and growth of the global technology and the increased need and importance of communication and information in a global supply chain network.  The increase in demand and shortening of product life cycles is one of the drivers of these technologies along with cultural demands from the growth of millennials in the market. Another important aspect driving the growth and demands of a global social supply chain are being driving by large Internet retailers such as Amazon and Alibaba that have exposed global direct to consumer delivery to eliminate the middleman of the supply chain.  

These technologies could not have become accepted by the market without each of the above factors playing a role in driving change. At this point the supply chain technology has reached a level of flexibility and capabilities that can support the velocity of change.  The challenge now is in coordination and collaboration of the change across the entire marketplace. The tools of collaboration are widespread and fully accepted by millennials and consumers alike and this acceptance is also feeding the demand for change and increase in the social supply chain. I believe this is a major factor in the expansion of technology in the social supply chain and this growth of comfort in technology and expansion of capabilities based on growth of millennials in the market and business world has also increased the velocity and level of disruption.

The retail sales and purchasing practices of consumers along with the growth of millennials in the marketplace are changing the culture to expect a higher level of collaboration, a higher level of flexibility and a higher level of capabilities.  These are the factors that have pushed the social supply chain technologies to disrupt the extended supply chain and support the flattening of the entire supply chain in the retail omni market

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?

Social Supply Chain Growth

The social supply chain is the convergence of the supply chain, Internet of Things (IOT) and social networks into a framework that supports and encourages collaboration across and between suppliers, carriers, merchants and consumers.  This has grown in capabilities as another result of the growth in capabilities and acceptance of mobile and wireless network technologies and is another example of the velocity of change driven across all everyday aspects and interactions of people and organizations that may need to interact on a regular basis.  The connectivity of things and people has reached a level of explosive growth and even more importantly the velocity of this growth as increased to to breakneck speed as a result of the acceptance or expectation of technology capabilities and is only limited by the imagination of consumers and industry itself.

This social supply chain growth is driven by the consumer acceptance and embrace of mobile and wireless technologies, just as these same consumers are changing the retail omni market.  This increase in both change and velocity of the changes as it relates to consumer interactions is directly related and this relationship and consumer expectations are also extending across into other aspects of the supply chain as well because these social changes reverberate through the entire market to improve efficiencies and communications in support of expanding collaboration demands.  The social supply chain changes have the additional layer of interaction from the connectivity of tools and flow that is made capable by the IOT technologies and improvements.

The growth of IOT technologies and tools in the market and especially as these tools and technologies relate to the supply chain execution increase the flexibility and the collaboration abilities across the entire supply chain, from suppliers to the end customer.  These increased capabilities are delivered through investments in technologies and bring immediate increased communication and data flow through the chain. These improvements are only limited by the imagination of the consumers and the supply chain partners throughout the chain.

The growth in communication, data and collaboration capabilities across the supply chain corresponds to similar growth patterns in the retail omni market.  The entire marketplace is impacted from the supplier to the end customer by the explosive velocity of demands to utilize these technologies by supply chain partners and consumers to increase visibility to use in all aspects of collaboration across the entire chain.  These changes are directly relatable to the consumer acceptance of the mobile and wireless technologies in combination with the growth of millennials in the marketplace along with the supply chain. These demands and changes are driving the supply chain to develop a social supply chain that incorporates IOT technologies and capabilities to help to support the demands.  

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?

Retail Shopping - Evolution or Revolution

Retail shopping has been revolutionized by the growth and capabilities of mobile and wireless network technologies. However I see this as a relatively slow moving revolution that has been coming together as a result of the evolution of shopping technologies and consumer acceptance of the technologies with the final push into a full resolution brought about by the growth and capabilities of mobile and wireless network technologies.  Another factor pushing retail shopping into a revolution has been brought about by consumers taking control of their shopping and purchasing habits as a result of their embrace of mobile and wireless network technologies. The tipping point of this revolution has been the embrace of the technologies that provide consumers a means to create their own shopping practices to support their lifestyles.

In hindsight you can see that the trends and capabilities that brought about this revolution have been building for quite some time, starting with the creation of the World Wide Web.  Thinking about the previous twenty years and through the trials and errors of retailers it seems that the evolution started with the combination of World Wide Web and Internet growth that allowed a visionary person like Jeff Bezos put together a company like Amazon that changed the relationship with consumers.  Each time retail shopping and purchasing is revolutionized it starts with a visionary retailer with an vision of the future that is at complete odds with the existing retail industry.

The turn of the 20th century Sears introduced the catalog revolution in shopping and purchasing that changed the environment because of its ability to bring together new and existing technologies in a manner that met the consumers lifestyle requirements.  Now we see at the turn of the 21st century Amazon taking advantage of opportunity and encouraging a revolution in shopping and purchasing because of its ability to bring together new and existing technologies in a manner that met the consumer lifestyle requirements.  

This has been a significant event that requires change from the large legacy retailers.  In many ways the changes we are experiencing turned from evolution to revolution because of the reaction from the large legacy retailers and the market to the changes being driven by consumers.  The market in general has fought these shopping and purchasing changes because of the loss of control it represents. This has been the pattern of these large legacy retailers specifically and the general retail market place generally fighting change.  This revolution now has been fueled by the growth and capabilities of technologies like mobile and wireless network growth along with healthy doses of imagination along with encouragement from pure play ecommerce retailers and supply chain partners supporting these capabilities.  The large retailers are beginning to recognize this revolution now and seem to accept the fact that the market will never return to the past. The question now is will this be enough and how can they recover?

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?

Retail Shopping Levers

Retail shopping has gotten more complicated over the recent years as a result of the expanded shopping and purchasing channels, technology, including wireless network technology, and most importantly the social network capabilities.  These new capabilities along with the explosion of mobile shopping apps has dramatically increased the number of shopping levers, this is what I call shopping and purchasing options. These levers have grown and expanded to the point now that has created a omni market retail marketplace that eliminates the lines, or silos, between the different purchasing channels.  Consumers have lead the charge in this direction through their embrace of the technology to explore capabilities and then utilize the new capabilities.

This consumer embrace of technology is the lever that is the most critical to the ability of retailers to meet the changing market and consumer demands.  This technology lever is also the most powerful lever for consumers to drive change into the retail market. When looking across the retail landscape you can see many of the key challenges and failures for retailers have been, and continue to be, driven by technology and especially when this technology is also embraced and driven by online retailers such as Amazon and and mobile technologies.  These changes are disruption because of the continuous level of iterative small changes that build on each other. This iterative and continuous change process is the key to success and a key lever of failure for many retailers.

Retailers have begun to recognize the importance of this practice on their business capabilities and success drivers and also have been struggling to catch up and maintain the pace of change.   You see this from the level and speed of acquisitions and capabilities supported by retailers. This is a key to the future and success of the retailers and it will be interesting to follow the results of this drive and the endurance of the large legacy retailers to maintain the pace of change.  

I believe that in order for retailers to maintain the pace it also requires a change in leadership culture and focus to maintain the pace.  There is a great deal of history examples where the retail market experiences a disruption that results in changes from the retail leaders to incorporate the disruption and move forward.  In this case though the disruption is more the change process and velocity than what the change delivers. This is the most interesting and challenging lever after all is said and done, the disruption in not an event but a process of change and retailers must change their own internal shopping and purchasing levers to increase flexibility and most importantly the ability to sense the changes.

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?

Retail Renewal

The retail market is in a process of renewal as a result of the disruption brought about by the omni market change by consumers to the market place.  This is a good thing and really a necessary thing that drives the market forward to support consumer demands. This time though the renewal is in part driven by consumers through technology and collaboration and part driven by consumer focused Internet retailers like Amazon that are themselves encouraging and experimenting with consumer changing demands.  I believe though that this renewal cycle is different from previous cycles in that the renewal will be a continuous cycle of change and renewal. This is the theme of this cycle of renewal and this is one of the key differences in this change cycle as well.

This cycle is driven by consumers rather than by some retailer, as in the past and this is a very important difference in this disruption.  The last major disruption to the market in my opinion was the explosion of Wal Mart on the market. This disruption, like previous disruptions, was driven by a retailer with a vision that was embraced by consumers.  This disruption, also like previous disruptions, spread through the market quickly with the concept, in this case the drive for the lowest price, accepted and extended by other retailers until it seems to be embedded in the market DNA.  This disruption is also in many ways at the root of the current disruption.

This current disruption started with the concept and the drive for the lowest price from consumers.  In the beginning consumers’ focus on low price was supported and driven by the opportunity of Internet retailers to cut prices.  This was the result though of retailers reacting to consumers and these same retailers attempting to gain market share. This drive from Internet retailers was borne of the drive to succeed and the ability of these new Internet retailers to take advantage of the market and cut costs dramatically because of their reduced overhead.  Now this lowest price concept and drive has become the foundation of the retail market in many ways and this concept has also in many ways now bitten the creator of the concept.

Now this concept along, with the combination of technology and the growing ability of the consumer to direct and even change their shopping is also disrupting the market.  Now this new renewal is all about the consumer ability redirect and direct their shopping in ways that support their individual lifestyles along with their desire to spend less and get more in return.  This new disruption also is creating a model for continuous renewal and disruption as technology changes and increases capabilities.

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?

How Incremental Change Can Increase Velocity

Retailer change cycles must change to become shorter and focus on incremental change in order to keep up with consumer demands.  This is a dramatic change to the historic view of change in the market and I believe the only way to increase the velocity of change for larger retailers.  Velocity in the retail market is the result of a continuous cycle of incremental changes that confirm assumptions and move the needle forward as it relates to meeting consumer demands.  This is an implementation of a classic continuous improvement program (PDCA cycle). While this may sound like a simple thing to enact, the difficulty lies in the execution and especially in the continuous nature of the execution.  It is easy for the cycle to be broken as a result of diverted attention, this is why the success of the program depends on the embrace and encouragement of leadership.

The large legacy retailers have worked in what I would call a monolithic development cycle, the changes are planned and coordinated together into major event releases that require significant development time and significant change management.  A good example of this is the ERP implementations that produced significant benefit to the business at a significant disruption. Granted, after the significant event there follow a period of time where enhancements are performed until the next significant major release of the software.  This approach works well for back office type applications and has served the legacy retailers to support a consistent platform across the many locations in the chain.

The Internet changed all of this because of the change in the shopping capabilities and practices.  Shopping and interaction with consumers require continuous change to the ‘store front’ in order to encourage consumers to return and purchase.  The large retailers have always continuously changed their product displays for season or special events or holidays and the eCommerce channel requires the same level of change in order to maintain a fresh view.  This approach and model has then extended into consumer offers and sales and purchasing capabilities as a result of the market opening up to social networks.

Amazon has perfected a model of incremental change to increase the velocity of market change to disrupt the omni market.  This model allows and encourages experimentation with features in quick cycles of trial and error and Amazon has even extended this model into their product development and offerings.  This change, and the disruption produced, is the velocity of the incremental change and the speed of disruption that this model produces. This is the shift that the large legacy retailers must make, they can do this by changing their culture to focus on incremental storefront improvements and building a flexible integration layer back to the back office systems.

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?