Retail businesses are increasingly facing serious challenges in today’s digital age. Whether the emergence of new competitors in the retail business, as well as increased operating costs and not worth with the revenue, has made some retail companies out of business. To respond to these challenges, the company’s leaders should begin to set up an effective digital transformation strategy.
Digital transformation has made dramatic changes in business operations. Many companies have benefited from both operational cost efficiency and revenue generation by implementing digital transformation. Basically, this is indeed the ultimate goal of digital transformation.
Digital Transformation Strategy For Retail Multi-Chain Businesses
Today’s business competition will revolve around improving efficiency and improving customer experience. By simplifying the process and continuously innovating, business will gain competitive value. Retail business sector with distributed stores has its own challenges.
With centralization, monitoring efficiency can be higher, consolidation of reporting can be done in a real time, inventory arrangements can be more grounded, and the determination of the selling price of goods can be more accurate. Thus, multi-category visibility and data processing are important in retail business. Prior to carrying out digital transformation, it is better for IT managers to devise a digital transformation strategies.
Digital transformation strategy will be very useful in the digital transformation process. It because, without strategy, digital transformation potentially will encounter many obstacles in the middle of the road.
There are three main fundamental factors to achieve an effective digital transformation strategy for retail businesses with multiple branches spread across multiple locations.
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IT Infrastructure Transformation
This is the first step in the long journey of digital transformation. Without transformingIT infrastructure, the process of digital transformation will have many obstacles in the middle of the road. Therefore, an effective digital transformation strategy involves transforming IT infrastructure to the highest priority to work on. IT infrastructure transformation should supported with DevOps method and the best backup strategy. Today, the most popular strategy involves a combination of physical and cloud data centers.
Hybrid clouds can provide operational efficiency and flexibility. For an example, Shell – an oil and gas company that has transformed their IT infrastructure since 2002, has transformed employee training methods with virtual reality (VR). This oil and gas company has saved training costs around USD 200 millions.
In multi-chain retail sector, IT infrastructure will be very useful for many things in today’s digital age, where virtualization and hybrid concepts are increasingly becoming business demands. This will be useful in the process of internal and customer operational transformation.
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Internal Operational Transformation
Retail businesses that have many branches should centralize it system. Visibility in real-time will make it easier for managers to make decisions and facilitate supervisors in doing tracking. Smooth networking system will ensure speed in operation.
Security needs to be improved by adding automated backups to protect business data from any interruptions. Communication systems that have a collaborative function can streamline internal processes and reduce phone and meeting costs. If your outlet has CCTV, it should be centralized. This can reduce CCTV operating costs in each branch. This will require a centralized CCTV monitoring system that can manage CCTV from various vendors.
Customer Operational Transformation
Many companies are already implementing online ordering. For example, IKEA with online ordering and satellite outlets for picking up goods, is an innovation in serving customers transact. Then we can see Domino Pizza, with full confidence in digital transformation, we can see more couriers queuing at cashier than people who eat on the spot. The point here is the speed and simplified business process.
With a solid IT infrastructure, your business can cut the queue length at the checkout. Especially for multi-branch restaurants, the faster the order process and integrated into all parts, the faster it can serve customers’ hunger. This is the core of the digital transformation of the customer’s operational side.
In implementing a digital transformation, there might exist several change in business concept. Both on the internal operational side, as well as on customer operations. Digital transformation requires innovation and creative ideas ‘above-the-line‘ to deliver more value to your business.
If customers has a positive experience, then they can become a loyal customer and will refer to others. Surely this can increase your sales and strengthen your business position in the market.
Elitery Support For The Retail Business
Elitery provide holistic and comprehensive solutions for retail business in Indonesia and in ASEAN. Elitery supported by our own TIER III data center, certified by The Uptime Institute, ISO 27001 certification, and PCI DSS certification for financial transaction security.
Elitery has always providing the right solutions to improve client’s business, such IT infrastructure transformation and managed IT services to support your business needs in this evolving digital era.
Elitery is also supported with cloud platform for application and critical business data backup solutions. Our backup technology already use machine learning to mitigate sophisticated cyber attacks, and has been used by hundreds of financial institutions in Indonesia.
Elitery’s professional team consists of multi background with a set combination of skills that needed to handle digital transformation preparation and process.
With proven positive experiences in retail sectors, Elitery can be relied on to manage your IT infrastructure and deliver innovations to support your retail business in this digital age.
Feel free to contact us to have professional support for your digital transformation plan and strategy.
