The retail year of 2016 is kicking off with a bang as the industry’s biggest fair, NRF, hosted in New York January 17-20.
As retail is one of IFS’s fastest growing segments we will be there to talk about industry trends, our solution for Retail and our customers. Welcome to meet with IFS at our booth #1054 at NRF!
This year we will have three key topics that will be presented at NRF, each offering new benefits for a retailer:
Sustainability enabled by IFS
The trend that consumers grow ever more environmentally conscious is having a significant impact on retailers’ businesses today. Retailers have a lot to do in the area of lifecycle sustainability. Manufacturing processes must be documented and proved. We can see a trend that customers are increasingly willing to pay a premium price for sustainable products. This started in the food industry but is also getting more common in the fashion and electronics industries. As a result, both processes and technologies for measuring and documenting sustainability in the production process are getting more important for fashion and electronics companies as well.
This is where sustainability enabled by IFS comes in allowing you to document your environmental initiatives and set up governance around them to comply with government regulations; but most importantly, to satisfy the demands of modern consumers, who expect environmental transparency, not as an optional extra, but as a self-evident aspect of the products they consume.
The solution is based on IFS Enterprise Operational Intelligence (EOI), IFS’s tool for visualization of complete business processes and connecting them to strategic objectives. It complements your existing application portfolio, providing you with a single picture of the truth and an adaptive end-to-end management layer. It helps you focus on the priorities of your corporate social responsibility (CSR) work, for example, ensuring effective management of sustainability issues within and outside your company.
New prototype retail concept: Enhance the shopping experience using smart glasses
Wearable technology is entering the retail sector in a number of ways. At IFS’s research section, IFS Labs, we continuously look at how new trends and technologies can be integrated with our product for our focus industries. For NRF, we have developed a new prototype retail concept using GoogleGlass.
Imagine if you as a customer can use the store’s GoogleGlass to track various products and their capabilities within the store just by looking at them. Or if the store personnel can retrieve data about the products, deliveries or stock levels from the ERP system in the same way. Collaborating with leading tech providers like Sony, Google and XMReality, IFS is exploring how to maximize the business value of smart glasses. Empowering our retail customers to stay close to and in control of their business is one of our most central drivers.
True Omni-channel Retail enabled by IFS
There is no doubt that omni-channel is one of the key retail trends that will keep shaping the industry the coming years. The analyst firm, Gartner, is saying that,
“Multi-channel retailing is becoming business as usual.”
This means that customers now expect it rather than it being a luxury option.
With an increasing number of customer touch points, the purchase journey is growing more complex. From a customer point of view you want to be able to find information about a product, approach the company and make the purchase in the channel of your choice – and you want to be able to create your own customer journey through the channels of your choice.
In order to provide this powerful omni-channel retail experience that satisfies demanding customers, companies must improve the planning process for different types of customer journeys and also implement the right technology backbone to support them.
At NRF, IFS will together with our partners Ateles and Centric showcase how we work to provide a true omni-channel retail experience. Ateles is one of the most experienced Nordic-based consulting companies specialized in developing high-quality solutions for eCommerce, PIM and omnichannel. Centric InPosition is a mobile solution that enables you to process payments on a mobile device through our certified card payment terminal link-up. This means that customers will no longer have to queue at the checkout, as you create an entirely personal service that sees a sales person guide each customer through the full sales process.
Together we will provide an overview of how a comprehensive omni-channel retail experience can look in the future.
