There has been much talk about ‘getting back to normal’ and ‘new normal’ that I have been thinking quite a bit about because of the continued cycles of lockdowns and now the latest pandemic surge. These disruptions on personal lives are also impacting the business world from a loss of jobs and business closing to the continued work from home requirements. It is past that time now to accept the new reality (I refuse to call it ‘new normal’!), if you haven’t already and take the appropriate steps to live in this new reality. We are already seeing the results of change and we really need to focus now on developing and executing a digital enablement strategy. The pandemic has driven change due to health and safety concerns and these changes themselve are driving the digital transformation. This transformation is beginning to increase in velocity as consumers accept and become accustomed to the new reality and we will never go back.
Any business that directly interacts with the consumer, retail - services, restaurants, for instance, have borne the brunt of the pandemic disruptions to the point of breaking and many have been pushed past that point to failure. Consumers have changed the retail and services markets forever through digital interactions that are redefining the consumer relationship. The changes to the market are not really new, but simply and more accurately, sped up dramatically in a natural progression that has been pushed to the limit by the pandemic. The change here is the ability of consumers to shop, and more importantly, to obtain goods and services without contact, whether eCommerce and delivered to their home or via curb-side pick-up.
Retailers must now take a multi-prong approach to their digital enablement activities; they must focus on a strategy that first defines and then delivers the digital enablement while they also focus on immediate response to the waves of disruption driven in many cases from the COVID-19 transition support requirements. This is difficult for all businesses and especially difficult for the legacy retailer that was already struggling with digital enablement before the pandemic. The change and disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed digital enablement past the tipping point though and this has now suddenly become a key to survival rather than a progressive transition. Now that this genie is out of the bottle there is no going back. It is now a matter of great urgency to define and implement a digital enablement strategy.
This will be an overwhelming task if the legacy retailers treat this as ‘business as usual’ because there just is no time for them to slow-walk the changes through the organization. If the legacy retailers treat this time of disruption the same as other changes in the market they will be left in the ditch, smouldering. This requires quick actions to move forward without an idea of the end result. At this point we don’t have any idea what the end will look like because the end is being defined and redefined through waves of disruption.
These retailers must implement a strategy of continuous change. They must build a flexible framework that is able to sense and then respond to the disruption. This will require a strategy of digital enablement to be able to sense the disruption and quickly respond. Unfortunately these same legacy retailers are also struggling with labeling applications and cumbersome integration between internal applications and their external partners. The first order of business is to build a flexible framework that will support the velocity of change, while also responding to disruption.
In addition to the above, these legacy retailers do not have the time to figure this out, they must act quickly. Fortunately there are two opportunities for retailers to incorporate in order to survive; consultant organizations to help with the strategy implementation and RPA tools to help bridge the digital enablement between legacy applications and partners. The first step is recognition and the support of senior leadership. This is a huge undertaking and requires a great deal of support from many different areas to succeed and this will require support over time to fail and correct direction. Without full throated support from senior leadership this will only end in failure.
Tom Brouillette
Contact: tbrouillette@ncspartners.com
@ncspartners
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Tom Brouillette discusses supply chain trends and provides strategic business & technology advice to his followers and companies.
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