The Retail Roadmap: Aligning People, Process and Technology

By John Stitz &

CEO, enVista

Julie Cheney

Sr. Retail Director, enVista

John Stitz is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of enVista. John has more than 25 years of sales execution, sales leadership and business ownership in the supply chain, transportation and IT services field. He co-founded enVista in 2002, in response to market demand around supply chain, transportation and unified commerce solutions.

Prior to co-founding enVista, Stitz served as Senior Director of Strategic Alliances at Manhattan Associates, Vice President of Marketing & Strategic Alliances at Intrepa and Vice President of Sales and Marketing at The Summit Group. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from St. Joseph’s College.

Matthew Guiste, Global Retail Technology Strategist, Zebra Technologies

Matthew is a veteran retail practitioner with more than two decades of experience across software, and hardware vendors, as well as working directly for retailers. He is passionate about combining strategy, design, and technology to transform retailers and create experiences that customers remember and care about.

Today Matthew is the Global Retail Technology Strategist for Zebra. Previously he spent 10 years at Starbucks and worked for Blue Yonder Software and AT&T Wireless. Matthew earned an MBA from the University of Washington.

The retail industry is, by nature, constantly evolving. Not only do product trends change, but the way in which customers want and need to shop for those products is fluid. We saw this in 2020 when retailers had to swiftly enable ecommerce capabilities to avoid getting swept away by brick-and-mortar shut downs. We’ve seen this as small to mid-size retailers have adapted their businesses to keep up with ecommerce giants. And we saw this with native e-commerce brands opening brick and mortar locations and direct-to-consumer brands venturing into the wholesale arena.

With such regular shifts in consumer demand and desires, ensuring an organization’s business and technology capabilities are aligned to its goals is imperative. Technology has been and will continue to be foundational to success, but it is only part of the puzzle. The people and process within an organization complete the picture. In 2023, retailers either will be or should be considering how the development or adjustment of a Capabilities Roadmap fits into their current and future business state.

Develop a Capabilities Roadmap

A Capabilities Roadmap is key to any successful organization. In 2023, this is going to become even more prevalent to the retail industry as disruptions continue and consumer demands change. It is important that your retail organization understands if its capabilities and business goals are aligned, can be accomplished and are right-sized. For example, consider whether your organization has the technological and business capabilities it needs for a smoothly-run business, both on the front and back ends.

What is a Capabilities Roadmap?

In most cases, a Capabilities Roadmap is driven by the internal IT organization when existing technology no longer supports current or future business needs or poses a technology risk to the company. It provides the opportunity to align an organization’s overall capabilities to its strategic business objectives. It outlines initiatives, dependencies, sequencing, resources, cost, implementation and change management strategies. The roadmap will include a combination of business process design work, organizational and role definitions, IT development and/or the selection and implementation of new technology.

Ultimately, the roadmap provides a holistic view of the organization, its capabilities across people, process and technology and its goals to keep organizational priorities in line and moving forward.

Why is a Capabilities Roadmap Important?

A capabilities Roadmap is critical to an organization’s success for several reasons:

It clarifies what, when and how key improvements will support the organization’s strategy. It also helps determine if the organization’s strategy is realistic and right-sized, or if it needs to be adjusted based on existing capabilities and future goals.
It facilitates cross-functional, proactive strategies and tactics that drive profitable revenue, standardization and collaboration.
It provides a clearly-defined and realistic approach to achieving company goals, which is of the utmost importance.

Executing Your Capabilities Roadmap Effort

There is no wrong time to execute a Capabilities Roadmap, but be sure to cover all three key areas of the business – people, process and technology. In doing this, you will uncover a set of short-term activities that will deliver results in three to six months.

Leverage Master Data Management (MDM)

Data is everywhere, and unfortunately, the majority of it is not being leveraged to its full potential. In 2023, this is going to change. One deliverable of a Capabilities Roadmap is Master Data Management. In 2023, retail leaders will increase focus on MDM in order to make informed business decisions.

What is MDM?

MDM is the never-ending quest for a single source of data truth across an enterprise. It is a cross-functional, process-oriented discipline that is supported by technology and provides a business complete ownership and access to its data.

MDM is particularly focused on managing data in a proactive, business-ready state.

The Capabilities Roadmap provides a holistic view of the organization, its capabilities across people, process and technology and its goals to keep organizational priorities in line and moving forward.

Why Leverage MDM?

Executing MDM across Your Enterprise

There are a few reasons why master data management will be critical for enterprises in 2023:

It unlocks the power of data by maintaining integrity across the enterprise journey.
It is a foundational stepping stone and aids in streamlining any technology implementation.

There are multiple types of governance models across master data management, and there is no one size fits all. It is important to find the approach that allows your organization to maintain data integrity and maximize data value. Often, a process-first, technology enablement approach is most effective in ensuring alignment between people, process and technology.

The State of the Retail Industry 2023

JAN 2023

07/05/2024 15:52:33

Go Beyond Window Dressing in 2023 With Data-Driven Experiences

By Irene Sibaja

Retail Industry Principal, Treasure Data

Over the past decade, the dominating story in retail has been around bifurcation, where consumers are given a choice to buy in-store or online, with in-store clearly dominating. During the pandemic the pendulum swung sharply to ecommerce, where we saw massive changes in shopping experiences over a very short period of time. As the pandemic continued, hybrid models like BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick Up In Store) became common and are here to stay. As we emerge from COVID it is clear that while physical stores will need to evolve to stay relevant to future generations, they are not going anywhere soon. Forget bifurcation…what we have now is a complete blurring of the lines between online and physical retail, and effective CX is the key to conquering both.

Customer experience without personalization is just window dressing. In 2023, winning retailers will be focused on capturing valuable data across the customer journey and leverage it in future interactions.

Irene Sibaja is the Retail Industry Principal at Treasure Data, a leading enterprise Consumer Data Platform (CDP) provider. Irene came to Treasure Data most recently from NielsenIQ where she was VP, Customer Success supporting Sam’s Club. At her core, Irene is customer-obsessed - she uses this focus, and 25 years of success across strategy, retail and data analytics, to drive innovative ROI solutions across diverse organizations. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in English Literature from Rice University.

However, one lesson retailers learned in 2022 is that customer experience without personalization is just window dressing. These three data-related trends will help brands get more out of their omnichannel stores in 2023:

Scan-And-Go Shopping

In 2023, many retailers will continue to evolve their eCommerce strategy by building even more sophisticated shopping apps that not only allow customers to complete a purchase in the middle of their shopping experience, but also provide tailored product recommendations. Stores are adding QR codes to physical displays that shoppers can scan with their mobile devices to learn more about the product in question, as well as see suggestions for products that would complement their purchase. Some of these QR codes enable a shopper to scan in-store and have products delivered to them at home. Yet another option for retailers is to adopt the “Just Walk Out” technology offered by Amazon Web Services. Users still have to download an app, but the in-store shopping experience becomes even more streamlined. These evolving technologies not only produce more satisfactory customer experiences, they also provide valuable data on the customer journey that retailers can leverage in future interactions.

Modern Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are constantly evolving. With ongoing inflation combined with third party cookie deprecation, loyalty programs are a critical piece of the marketing strategy. These programs successfully capture first party information that retailers can leverage for ongoing personalization initiatives. In 2023 we will see continued growth in loyalty, with a specific focus on engaging the elusive younger consumers who are less tethered to email addresses as the primary identifier.

In lieu of email, younger customers leave digital footprints on servers everywhere…with particular focus on Discord, Instagram, and TikTok. In order to reach this demographic, many retailers will update their first-party data collection methods and start to accept modern identifiers for their loyalty programs so that they can meet these shoppers where they most often are.

Connected Customer Experiences

Regardless of which channel shoppers ultimately use, there are some purchases that require a higher level of touch (think jewelry, cars, furniture). While chatbots can answer some simple inquiries, other purchases may require a more nuanced conversation. Many retailers have trained contact center agents who can support customers depending on their needs, but for the most part service remains disjointed and a point of friction. Customers are often forced to repeat themselves and provide a full history of their journey because support teams lack the data to connect all of their touchpoints. To eliminate the frustration that comes from having to explain a situation to YET ANOTHER person, companies can leverage technology such as a CDP to pull the cookie crumbs of customer data together to tell a meaningful story about a customer making for a smooth experience that will bring that buyer back again and again.

The State of the Retail Industry 2023

JAN 2023

07/05/2024 15:52:33

The AI Stride: It’s Getting More Powerful

By Francois Chaubard, Founder & CEO, Focal Systems

Francois Chaubard is the CEO of Focal Systems, a deep-learning computer vision company focused on automating brick-and-mortar retail. Prior to founding Focal Systems, Chaubard worked at Apple as a deep learning researcher on secret projects. Before that, he attended Stanford University as a dual masters in CS and EE where he researched deep learning and computer vision under Fei Fei Li, the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) at Stanford University. There he created and taught 2 courses: CS231m: Mobile Computer Vision and CS224d: Deep Learning for NLP. He was also the TA for Stanford's famous Machine Learning course CS229: Machine Learning. Before that, he was a missile guidance algorithm researcher at Lockheed Martin building the next generation of the U.S. AEGIS Ballistic Missile Defense System. Before that, he received a bachelor's from University of Delaware in Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering.

Welcome to 2023. We have ChatGPT that can write poems, press releases, and legal docs far better than 99% of the population. We have DALL-E and Stable Diffusion that can draw and paint far better than 99% of the population. And in retail, where we have AI that can order better, planogram better, perform loss prevention better, manage shrink better, and schedule labor better than 99% of the population.

This is quite an exciting time to be alive honestly. Never before has AI proven so much promise.

Retail has been fraught with huge challenges over the last decade, the last three years in particular. Chief among these is labor. The issue hits on two fronts.

On one hand, there is a massive labor shortage. This leads to problems across the board with supply chain disruptions to long lines at the register. A lack of stockers means more workable out-of-stocks that could be filled, but instead the inventory just sits in the back. As the available pool of workers diminishes, opportunities for profit go with it.

On the other hand, the cost of labor is only increasing. With new locally-enforced minimum wage laws and the market growing more competitive, labor costs will continue to rise and consume whatever profits a store has.

In short, retailers will need to achieve more with a smaller workforce to maintain or grow their profit margins.

Serendipitously, as mentioned in the beginning of the article, AI has just hit its stride, and is only getting even more powerful. So AI can and should be leveraged to cull the gap!

However, for retailers to adopt AI, they will need a meaningful change in thinking. What needs to happen now is a dramatic change in the way retail is performed, thinking AI first, instead of labor and process first. Historically, Brick and Mortar retail has been one of the slowest adopters for new technology, holding out a select few. The retail sector at large needs to transition to adopt this new approach that is centered around the power of AI.

AI will be the focus of the next decade, just as e-commerce has been the focus of the last decade. The true retail revolution will occur in the coming years.

Let’s discuss the benefits first. To begin, AI is the perfect employee. It’ll never call out sick or come to work with a hangover. It’s always present and constantly optimizing itself to fulfill its objective function. This alone is a feat no human is capable of, our bodies need rest, but an AI is always awake. No human is 6 sigma. But AI can be and very often is.

In addition to filling the gap, AI can actually improve the quality of service while reducing costs by 10-20x. AI can detect patterns and key data points that the human mind misses. And finally, one “lesson” learned in one store, like seeing the impact of an additional labor hour scheduled in the afternoon, can instantly be applied to all stores within a day without any human in the loop.

Not only does AI fill in the void, it also actively enhances a store's profits.

We may have thought that the pandemic years caused the greatest shift in the retail industry. My prediction is that the true revolution will occur in the coming years. 2023 will be marked by increased labor costs even as labor shortages hold fast. This will necessitate AI adoption, which mandates a complete paradigm shift in thinking of retail leadership.

AI will be the focus of the next decade, just as e-commerce has been the focus of the last decade. Rest assured it will be a wild ride. I am just excited that I get a front row seat!

The State of the Retail Industry 2023

JAN 2023

07/05/2024 15:52:33