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RTG Newsletter
Published Quarterly by the Retail Technology Group February, 2006
In addition, the display devices can be touch screens, which offer a myriad of interactive opportunities.Well here is another interesting concept. We have taken a very serious look at a product called Visual Retailing, which is an extension of existing products for hard goods, to the apparel segment. The product enables retailers to determine a ‘look’, layout the specific fixtures, populate the fixtures with actual product, and create the desired assortment for groups of store footprints. The process creates assortments by definition. These assortments can be brought back into Assortment Planning tools to reflect the reality of what fits in each box. The product further enables the retailer to disseminate these floor sets to the respective store groups either through an intranet or e-mail, in a timely manner, and thereby improve store compliance with centrally issued directives. Apparel retailers, and apparel brands with shops-within-shops are missing an opportunity if they don’t look into this product.
An up-and-coming genre of applications is that of Workforce Management (WFM). First there was Time & Attendance, then came the extension to Labor Scheduling, and now we have arrived at Workforce Management, the ultimate umbrella under which the first two live. Workforce Management holds the promise of being able to reduce the highest of a retailer’s cost after merchandise: labor. WFM solutions are available as in-house-resident and on-demand (where the retailer pays by transaction processed). Some solutions are costly but others are moderately priced, and most have a quick payback in their respective industry segments.
Last but not least are Business Intelligence and dashboards. BI has been getting a lot of play lately in the print media, but we feel it’s not getting the attention it deserves from middle-tier retailers. Here is a tool or tool set that could enable every organization’s executives to place their finger on the pulse of their business and enable them to drill down the information stream until they pinpoint the reason for less-than-stellar performance and fix it, or for better than expected performance and attempt to discover why, so they can emulate it across the enterprise. Many of the large corporation heads in America use these dashboards religiously and on a daily basis. We think it’s a tool for the masses, not just for the élite.