The Companies with Most Disruptive Retail Solutions 2019

www.insightssuccess.com June 2019

Volume- 6 Issue- 1

The

Companies

with Most

RetailSolutions 2019 Company of the Month

Jay Hakami Sky IT Group

Sailesh Savani Founder & CEO CompuLynx

Connecting Global Retailers and Suppliers with an Innovative SaaS Platform

E Embracing Changes

O

ver the past decade, the retail industry has gone through a major transformation, and it continues to evolve quickly. However, to stay competitive, most of the retailers have moved from growth from new stores to growth via investments in areas like launching new sales model, which of course is digital, acquiring new businesses, or even transforming the fulfillment processes of those businesses.

According to experts, the market will soon be defined by emerging technologies that can change the way consumers interact with the brand of their choice, the emergence of the new battle lines for e-commerce platforms. So, let us look at few of the trends that could change the retail sector in the years to come.

Experiential Retail, the new Fad: Thanks to the millennials, consumers are slowly moving away from shopping for products, and seeking for a much more engaging experience. Thanks to all these, a simple remodeling of a store is no longer possible and more than 3800 stores are all set to close their shutters by the end of the year. So, in order to stay in the competition one has to survive by creating an engaging experience.

Privacy: Thanks to the connected world, privacy has become an area of concern for everyone. And for retailers, data is the need of the hour. For over a decade, the retail industry struggled with the use of data.

However, now with the regulations, retailers are slowly putting privacy compliance road maps in its place. At the end of the day, integrity matters the most when it comes to creating brand loyalty, especially when dealing with personal information.

Faster Shipping Process: With the ever growing usage of internet and social media, e-commerce is quickly marching towards becoming one of the most popular shopping platforms. Nowadays, most of the brand maintains their online presence and that too by offering very competitive price. However, selling products in a competitive price doesn’t always cut through, as with the fast paced lives clients expect a faster delivery. Hence, there entered programs like Amazon Prime, which have made the two day shipping a standard procedure, as cutting down shipping time is very much important when it comes to staying afloat.

“

Customers don't care how much you know,

“

until they find out how much you care.

Kaustav Roy

Embracing New Technologies: Now is the perfect time for retailers to find out how to scale solutions like ERPs and others and embed them into their way of doing businesses. Retailers should make some significant changes and constantly mine the collected data, adapt to the future of the work and transform their operations in order to deliver on the brand promise.

So, here are few trends that could change the world of retail for good. Lastly these trends in retail are completely driven by the brilliant combination of shifting consumer preference, and an evolving technological landscape.

So, in order to acknowledge companies that are working round the clock to make the retail industry a better place, Insights Success has enlisted, “The Companies with Most Disruptive Retail Solutions 2019”.

Featuring our Cover Story is Sky IT Group, a company which has a knack of solving complex business problems with a perfect combination of hardware, software and exceptional technical expertise. The company was formed in November 2000. At that point of time with such a small team, the organization put a strong emphasis on its staff - education, certifications, training, seminars, and customer service is what drives innovative solutions to exceed customer expectations.

Also while flipping the pages, don’t forget to go through the articles and CXOs written by our in-house editorial team and industry experts respectively.

Happy Reading!

CONTENTS Cover Story

08

Sky IT Group Connecting Global Retailers and Suppliers with an Innovative SaaS Platform

16 08

Expert’s Talk Develop Your INNOVATION CULTURE for a FUTURE-READY

28

Leadership Column

Is the Single Brand Dead in MPS?

40

Expert’s Insights BARAMI One Stop Shop for Professionals on the Go

24

Innovations in the Field of Printing Business

20 Chromis POS Changing the POS Industry since Inception

3 Remarkable printing

Industry Pointers Critical Importance of

34

Digital Marketing in the growth of Start-ups

Industry Trends

46

Key POS Trends Retail Sector the Reshaping

26 Cloud4Wi When the Goal is to Help Customers Succeed

32 Eurostop Helping Retail Sector since Inception

38 Ivy Mobility Transforming Merchandising through Cloud Computing

44 Proď€ tect Improving Business Intelligence Since Inception

CONTENTS

Editor’s Choice

Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal Executive Editor Kaustav Roy

Managing Editor Anish Miller

Assistant Editors Jenny Fernandes Bhushan Kadam

Visualizer

Art & Design Director

Associate Designer

David King

Amol Kamble

Iresh Mathapati

Senior Sales Manager Co-designer

Co-designer Priyanka

Business Development Manager

Kshitij S

Peter Collins

Marketing Manager

Sales Executives

John Matthew

David, Kevin, Mark, Manish

Technical Head

Business Development Executives

Jacob Smile

Steve, Joe, Alan, Vishal

Technical Specialist Aditya

Digital Marketing Manager Marry D’Souza

SME-SMO Executive Prashant Chevale

Research Analyst Calvin Jones

Database Management Stella Andrew

Circulation Manager Robert Brown

Technology Consultant David Stokes

sales@insightssuccess.com June, 2019 Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com

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Reprint rights remain solely with Insights Success.

The

Companies with Most

Retail Solutions 2019

Jay Hakami Founder, President & CEO

Connecting Global Retailers and Suppliers with an Innovative SaaS Platform

Retail intelligence, business insights and consumer trends from more than 200 retailers representing more than 10,000 stores located on six continents to 2500+users from 800+ global fashion and beauty brands.

“

“

Cover Story

Sky IT Group prides itself not only an amazing and superior technology but also with a very determined, talented and knowledgeable teams of professionals with a thirst for knowledge and a passion for innovation. Bringing together industry experts and technology wizards have proven to be a perfect combination for the company’s success. Sky IT Group’s biggest asset has been and always will be the committed teams of professionals who work tirelessly on building, developing, deploying and supporting its ever growing client base.

The edition The Companies with Most Disruptive Retail Solutions 2019 envisions admiring tireless efforts of such pioneers and takes pride to feature Sky IT Group as its cover.

In an interview with Insights Success, Jay Hakami the Founder, President, and CEO of Sky IT Group shared insightful information about the organization, its flagship products, vision and many more.

Below are the highlights of the interview between Insights Success and Jay Hakami: Give a brief overview of Sky IT Group, its uniqueness, and vision.

Sky IT Group – headquartered in NYC - was founded in 2000 with a clear mission to solve complex business challenges with information technology solutions. We targeted the retail and wholesale apparel, footwear, and beauty/cosmetics industries. This focus led to the development of two complementary SaaS solutions: a) SKYPAD for Wholesale, which provides suppliers with insights into their product sales performance across all of their retail partners, as well as their company-owned retail channels, and b) SKYPAD for Retail, which provides multi-vendor retailers with a cost-effective platform to distribute sell-through data to their vendor community with a “best practices” reporting views.

“Proven “best practices” sell-through data collection, distribution and reporting solutions for retailers and wholesalers

“

F

ounded with a mission to solve complex business problems utilizing the perfect combination of hardware, software and exceptional technical expertise, Sky IT Group evolved to be recognized as the trailblazer in retail industry since its inception in November 2000. During its initial phase, although with a small team, the organization focused on business intelligence solutions to retail and wholesale industries. As a result of a strong industry understanding combined with exceptional data science and analytics expertise, the company has created a SaaS platform – SKYPAD – that serves as the engine for sell-through data distribution, collection and reporting between the retailers and wholesalers.

What are the cutting edge services/solutions offered by Sky IT Group?

SKYPAD for Wholesale today collects sell-through data from more than 200 retailers representing well over 10,000 stores around the world servicing 800+ global luxury suppliers/brands. SKYPAD is a unique engine built to collect data from any retailer, in any format, and organize it in a way that allows users to analyze the “what, when, where” of their product performance across all of their sales channels. SKYPAD offers the ability to report by any combination of store location, product attributes and time dimension.

SKYPAD for Retail serves as a vehicle for multi-vendor retailers to standardize sell-through data distribution and grant their merchants access to the same reporting provided to the suppliers/brands, while fostering open collaboration between sellers and buyers.

What are your strategies to understand the customer needs?

SKYPAD is constantly evolving based on our customers’ input. We continue to spend significant time with our suppliers/brands customers and retailers to understand their needs, and we modify the data capturing process and reporting based on their business requirements. In addition, we provide training to our existing customers - at no charge – so new and additional users can take advantage of the SKYPAD platform. Out of these sessions, we can identify ways to enhance the core SKYPAD offerings.

What are the challenges faced while catering to the customer needs and how Sky IT Group is serving to tackle them?

The SKYPAD platform has unlimited reporting capabilities yet each customer prefers viewing their data in ways that are specific to their business decisions. Therefore, we have developed an ad-hoc reporting view that allows each user to easily create their unique, user-defined reports.

About the Leader Jay Hakami is Founder, President, and CEO of Sky IT Group is an 18-year IT solutions provider, headquartered in NYC. Mr. Hakami's 30+ years of successful executive leadership roles have always focused on in-depth understanding of business challenges and solving them with the deployment of creative and practical IT solutions.

Prior to founding Sky IT Group, for a period of 10 years, Mr. Hakami served as Senior Vice President and large system integrator with the overall responsibility of operations, marketing, sales, and services delivery of ERP and business intelligence solutions for the apparel manufacturing and distribution industries.

In 2000 Mr. Hakami founded Sky IT Group. During the ďŹ rst few years, the business focus was on business intelligence and data warehouse projects speciďŹ cally for the fashion industry.

All of which led to the development of SKYPAD, the industry staple for sell-through data sharing between retailers and their suppliers/brands.

“

Transforming the way retailers distribute sell-through data and how suppliers/brands consume it for optimized decision making and unparalleled collaboration between buyers and sellers.

“

Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learned that have shaped the journey of the company.

Sky IT Group was formed in 2000 to provide business intelligence and data warehousing to the retail and wholesale industries. At the time, there was very limited “retail intelligence”, insights, and data sharing between retailers and their suppliers. This was the problem that the SKYPAD platform has come to address. In 2008, SKYPAD started as a literal back-of-napkin sketch that became a PowerPoint presentation. Contemporary designer brand Theory and mid-market brand development group Chaus U.S.A. were among the first presented to and remain subscribers to this day. SKYPAD’s features and benefits have grown along with its client base, expanding first domestically then globally. Today, it provides data from 10,000+ stores on six continents to 2,500+ users at 800+ brands, being used by 72% of the global luxury fashion brands to make sound business decisions based on facts.

Our current user community includes global luxury brands such as; LVMH, Kering, Michael Kors, Tory Burch, Brunello Cuccinelli and a host of others. Major retailers currently utilizing the SKYPAD Platform for data distribution include Saks Fifth Ave, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, and more.

What according to you could be the potential future of the retail industry and how does Sky IT Group envision sustaining its competency?

Today, forward-looking retailers are willing to share data with their suppliers more than ever before. However, with their legacy systems, this becomes a tedious, timeconsuming task and ends up being handled by the retail buyers in a very inconsistent, manual way. Meanwhile, the suppliers/brands need timely and accurate insight into product sales across all their sales channels. For informed decision-making and planning, they must know which styles, colors, and sizes are selling well and which are not by chain, store locations, as well as by span of time.

SKYPAD has effectively addressed both challenges by providing retailers with a platform to facilitate the data distribution to their suppliers at no cost to them. The suppliers/brands have found SKYPAD to be their “best practices” dashboard, presenting a complete reporting of their merchandise sales performance across all the retail customers, company-owned stores, and web sales.

Where does Sky IT Group see itself in the long run and what are its future goals?

We believe we are still at the beginning of our journey. We consider SKYPAD as the “engine” between every retailer and their suppliers/brands. It certainly benefits the retailers as they reduce costs, and better serves the suppliers by standardizing their data sharing through one entity. The

suppliers/brands can see their product sales performance on SKYPAD in a timely, consistent, accurate, and secure manner to improve their decision making. Both retailers and suppliers/brands can interact by looking at the same views on SKYPAD and therefore, enhance collaboration and have a meaningful discussion based on facts. We are continuously innovating and adding functionality and solutions that not only optimize the user experience but address market changes and business needs.

Motivating Client Admirations “We are continuously looking at ways in which we can drive productivity, enhance collaboration, and strengthen business insights. The data that SKYPAD’s platform delivers will enable our merchants to connect with our vendorpartners more efficiently, helping us to better meet our ultimate goal of delivering our customers an unparalleled shopping experience.”-Tracy Margolies, Chief Merchant, Saks Fifth Avenue.

“Our industry structure and dynamics continue to change at an accelerating pace. We strongly believe that with the use of tools like SKYPAD we can enable greater collaboration between our teams and our brands, with better insights and faster execution.” - Nathan Johnson, Senior Vice President, Merchandise Planning, Neiman Marcus Group.

“SKYPAD is a great partner for Theory. They are a trusted resource for brands, giving them the ability to monitor sales performance and aggregate data across selling platforms considering multiple variables and performance indicators.” - Andrew Rosen, Founder and CEO of Theory and Helmut Lang “To collect data from so many different data sources accurately not only saves us significant time and money, it provides us accurate insights into trends early in the season so we can take action to maximize selling and profitability with our retail partners.” - Jason Epstein, Senior Vice President of Operations at Alice + Olivia

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Develop Your About the Author Natalie Turner is a Keynote speaker and Author of the book Yes, You Can Innovate. Discover your innovation strengths and develop your creative potential which was selected as book of the month in both the UK and Singapore earlier this year. She is the Founder and CEO of The Entheo Network, a global innovation company and has exemplary expertise in the eld of marketing, business strategy, and leadership development.

Under her leadership, the company provides a suite of innovative products and services to help individuals and organizations create new sources of value whilst building innovation skills, capabilities and culture. She is also the inventor of the 6 ‘I’s® Innovation which measures innovation strengths of individuals and teams to unlock the innovation culture in an organization. www.6-i-innovation.com.

INNOVATION for CULTURE a FUTURE-READY

Organisation A

s the digital landscape continues to change at a rapid pace, dismantling and disrupting the way that we do business, how can we ensure that our leadership and organisational thinking evolves at the same rate? The CEO is ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the company that they lead, which, in today’s world, means ensuring an organisation can adapt to this fast rate of change. To do this, leaders need to know how to innovate with agility and speed. This means, on the ground during day-to-day work, that each employee has a clear understanding of how they contribute to creating value out of new ideas and a common language to enable them to work together. As a CEO, part of your role is to foster a culture of innovation that can harness the often disparate skills and mindsets required to successfully innovate. The key is to understand that innovation is a journey, which includes spotting trends and discontinuities and generating new ideas, through to investing and implementing those ideas that can potentially have the most impact. The skill is to know how to match people’s strengths to the right part.

How do employees currently react to innovation conversations?

Often, the first people to embrace innovation tend to love ideas and can identify trends, patterns and opportunities. They are curious and fit the classic stereotype of creativity – playful, open-minded and attracted to

16

June 2019|

Expert’s Talk

novelty. Innovation, truly deep and sustainable innovation, combines both creativity and discipline, which are curious bedfellows. It is a considered process that requires a raft of different skills and ways of thinking, combined towards creating a common outcome. In fact, the innovation journey is more like a cycle that can start at any point, not just in the playful and curious spaces.

There are probably many employees in your organisation who do not identify with this sense of curiosity, or think that they have light bulb moments, but who are nonetheless crucial to the success of innovation as an outcome. You will not embed an agile innovation culture without showing employees of all stripes and skillsets where they fit in. The innovation culture needs a common framework and language. Within this shared understanding, different styles are more likely to interact with, and appreciate, the contribution of others. Creating the best environment for each stage of the journey, so that people are empowered to contribute their strengths will improve the likelihood of success.

Understanding the innovation journey Start with aligning teams around PURPOSE, what are they trying to achieve and why? Then move to how they can identify opportunities through understanding trends and patterns, often related to changes in human behaviour. Then move to the creative space where people ignite ideas, through practices such as brainstorming and value proposition design. After you have an array of ideas, submit them to analysis and experimentation, separating the good ones from the bad, investigating whether they are useful, not just novel. The interrelationship between these three spaces is often where you see design thinking processes in action. Now, if you have a few really good ideas that have a high chance of working, start to think through how to best make them work. If not, revisit the original-identified opportunity or generate alternative ideas and solutions.

When ready for investment, innovation leadership is really critical. This is often the graveyard of ideas. Here demonstrate courage; assign resources, whether it is people, time or money. Once ideas are funded, find people who are great at implementation and getting things done. Once the idea is starting to get traction and have an impact, harness the skills of improvement and optimisation to scale and leverage the ideas into other areas of opportunity.

There are no straight roads. This is why innovating is often so difficult. Not only are you trying to do something new,

18

you have to harness diversity towards an often unknown outcome. Creating the best environment for each stage of the journey, so that people are empowered to contribute their strengths, will help to create a successful outcome.

This means teaching people when to contribute and when to pass the baton on to someone else. This is true collaboration, anchored in a clear purpose that is focused on the success of the idea.

Give each of your employees a proactive role in the innovation journey Culture could be termed “how we do things around here” and part of what contributes towards this is how leaders act and behave towards the people that they manage and lead.

Even more so when it comes to innovating. If people understand their contribution, they will have the confidence and courage to start thinking of themselves as innovators.

They will also understand when they will have the most impact. The innovation journey needs a different culture at different points; a culture that allows for ideas to be generated is not the same as one needed to investigate those ideas.

Innovation and the CEO Lead by example. Understand the part of the innovation journey that you are best at, and be aware of the bias that you will have because of that. Increase the awareness of yourself and others,so that you can empower everyone to cultivate environments that allow their strengths to flourish.

Ensure that every skillset and its contribution to innovation is respected and rewarded. This can only be done by understanding the whole of the innovation journey, end-toend. Diversity is key, if you have a lot of people who are good at generating ideas, you may end up with very little that actually gets done. If you have a lot of people who are good at implementation, you may end up dealing with today’s work very well, but not have the culture of a future-ready organisation that can adapt to fast-paced change tomorrow. In empowering your leaders and employees to develop their creative potential, in the broadest sense of the word, innovation will start to seep through the whole of your organisation, embedding a culture that will increase the likelihood of you creating impactful value out of new ideas.

June 2019|

The

Companies with Most

Retail Solutions 2019

Chromis POS Changing the POS Industry since Inception

C

hromis POS, the open sourced point of sale solution provider started its voyage in 2013, whilst the founder of the organization was looking out to help one of his friends to replace his cash register. Both of them had some requirements that they wished to meet; one of the big ones was cost of ownership. It was at this point John the founder of Chromis stumbled on to a number of open source products.

However none of these met the needs completely. So he started to write modifications for one, after a period of time John wrote a kitchen screen module and that was really the start of Chromis.

In 2015 the decision was made to create John’s own fork of the software and Chromis was officially born. John doesn’t prefer to call Chromis a company and asserts that it is more of a project of love. The organization does not have an income stream and there are no paid employees. In fact it is supported entirely on the forum by friends and users from around the world.

The Guardian Angle John Lewis, the Founder of Chromis was born and completed his education from Stafford, England. He 20

has been working for a large cinema chain since completing his “A” levels. During his stint at the cinema chain he has held multiple roles with the business. When it comes to IT, John thinks he was lucky in some ways. He encountered his first computer, an old English Electric main frame which was owned by a local polytechnic whilst still in education. Later in 1982 John became the proud owner of his first computer, a Sinclair ZX81. It was at that point he became interested in programming, writing in assembly language, he even had some games on the ZX Spectrum release by one of the budget labels. John eventually followed this with a move into hardware, repairing home computers of the 80’s for the local shops, all of this whilst working full time.

Prior to starting Chromis, John introduced a number of enhancements to an open source POS. These were initially started to meet the needs of a friend, it also meant he had to get back into programming and learn a new language. It was these changes that provided a wealth of interest, in the features being added. He eventually rose to the challenges on the forum for feature requests and gained

recognition on the forum. While he had not had any impact on the commercial products, John would like to think that those changes and introductions of new features have influenced new forks of the project.

Shaping the Journey According to the organization, the growing number of users is a big achievement; it is this user base that increases the desire to want to provide improvements to the application. Still, one of the biggest regrets of the founder John are, not starting to work on user manual earlier, there has never been a manual available, even for the original project from which Chromis was forked. However, this is now on going and is a lesson learned. Once complete, it should make the system even easier to setup. On the other hand, John thinks he should have certainly look at how he handled code created by others, following issues once imported in to the main project, which is entirely based on his past experience. He also added, “At the same time I would also have changed some of the database types supported sooner; it beacame difficult maintaining differences between them.”

June 2019|

Chromis is a dynamic point of sale application that offers exibility and ease of use, but best of all it is free to own and use.

Also when it comes to sustaining competency John is working round the clock in order to add features which will meet the needs of the consumers and improve the flexibility and ease of use of the product.

Painting the Picture of the Future When it comes to the picture of the future, Chromis would like to be in a position to spend more time working on the product. And as the market changes, Chromis will eventually change the way it works, to allow more interaction with e-Commerce sites.

‘‘

‘

‘

John Lewis Founder

“Having recently started in business, I need a till system of some kind, the biggest problem was cost. I started with a small Casio till but soon became disillusioned. I emailed John when a friend of mine mentioned about looking at epos and gave me the Chromis web site details. After a few emails and advice on hardware, which john also helped me source, I had the software installed and running all within a month of the first email. All I can say is great and thanks.”- Alex Leishman – Vanillis

Client Feedback “We are a family business of 35 years, and felt that we needed to change with the times. John helped source and recode the software to suit our needs. That was back in 2013, once Chromis was released in 2015, we moved over to that. It is great we can now get reports of all kinds, making things like checking best sellers simple.

We have had no problems in training the new staff we had to employ when we moved to bigger premises; it is so easy for them to use.”- Phil Lawton – Kidsgrove Tropicals |June 2019

21

3

Innovations

in the Field of

Printing

Business I

n the year 1450, when Blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg ďŹ rst introduced a movable type press in the German city of Mainz, a printing revolution had got erupted.

This invention encouraged more people to proliferate and distribute their creative/informative ideas though printed texts. Sooner, plethora of work related to literature, religious scriptures, scientiďŹ c papers, ontological treaties, law texts among other started publishing out in the European region which later got adopted globally at large scale and helped individuals and others to promote/sell their ideas.

This printing revolution still considered as one of the most important event in the history of printing and for the humankind as a whole. With the passage of time many other inventions have been taken places that have boosted the printing business at large.

Here we have enlisted some of the recent developments that are worth mentioning, and which are also considered as a turning point for the arena of printing business.

24

June 2019|

Editor’s Choice Nano Printing: 3D printing has witnessed many remarkable breakthroughs in recent years, Nano printing is one such innovation. Due to this cutting-edge printing technology it is now possible to print and integrate tiny components directly on to the integrated circuits include micro-lenses onto photonic circuits and deformable structures on MEMS actuators.

environment friendly. In this technology, the ink is not made of plastic and other damaging petroleum or fossil fuels; instead ‘water’ here is act as the main solvent and thus makes it an environment friendly printing technology.

Moreover, what are making this technology scalable and popular are its other fascinating features famously includes its fine print quality and affordability over the other prevailing printing technologies.

Interestingly, what was a dream some decades ago has become a reality with this technology as it is now possible to print microscopic objects with complex geometry and sizes of nanometres to several millimetres. Such things can be printed on a single printing step and that too on a scale which was not possible before. Such innovative change of on-printing brings new perspectives for developing nano and microscopic 3D component in a hassle free manner.

Its solvents decrease the time and heat necessary to absorb the ink film on fabric and instead of just spreading on the outer layer of the fabric, its ink flow deep into the fabric and create a much better look and ultimately a much better end-user experience. Further, water based inks are thinner and you can actually print with higher precision to give a good texture as compared to thicker inks like plastisol.

Moreover, its application has significance in many vital areas including Artificial Organs, Tissue Engineering, Stem cell-based Regenerative Medicine and Therapy, Fabrication of Nano Scale Devices among other. Customers also reap huge benefit by utilizing this technology as it provides great precision, stability, and support 3D custom design at large scale.

Moreover, the increased softness and flexibility of waterbased prints have the potential to win customers heart every time when they touch a fabric printed using this technology.

Many leading organization are considering this technology over plastisol and it is just the matter of time before this technology becomes an industry standard in the printing business.

How this Technology Works?

In this printing technology, Nanoscribe’s Photonic Professional GT system uses the technique of two-photon polymerization. In this process a laser gets expose to a photosensitive resin by a high-numerical aperture objective that too in a controlled trajectory following CAD design.

The interesting thing here is that the material gets solidified only in the laser focused spot and thus allows printing the exact 3D structure with submicron features. Such advancements have expanded the use of this technique for printing pre-manufactured circuits and opens new ways for executing on-chip printing as well. Nanotechnology for printing – is truly innovative as it alters materials at the atomic and molecular level.

Conductive Ink: Invention of conductive ink is one the greatest milestones in the business of printing and it has the potential to change thefuture of printing business as well.

Water-based Printing: Many printing technologies use inks made from harmful chemical substances which creates negative impact on the printer, wearer and the environment at large. Usage of harsh chemicals and toxic waste also always keep various regulatory agencies on vigil. Therefore, there was a dire need of a technique which can do a fine printing by minimizing the bad effects on environment at large. The birth of water-based printing fulfilled that need.

What's unique in this technology is its ‘ink’ which contains conductive materials like silver nanoparticles or conductive polymers which gives them the ability to conduct electricity. This conductive (Silver) ink has multiple uses today including printing RFID tags as used in modern transit tickets, they can be used to improvise or repair circuits on printed circuit boards as well. Although, this technology is in early stage and its mainstream adoption may probably takes several years but it is a promising technique which can be effectively used in many different applications including the creation of interactive posters, billboards, and other advertising materials.

Interestingly, this technology also holds promise to play sound just by touching a paper or connect you to your phone app just by interacting with a poster on the wall that is linked to the app. Moreover, it has the same capacitive sensing technology that is present in modern day electronic devices like tablets, smartphones among others.

The innovation of water-based printing has started a new era in printing space which is hugely considered as

|June 2019

25

The

Companies with Most

Retail Solutions 2019

Cloud4Wi When the Goal is to Help Customers Succeed

W

ith a mission to help enterprises across multiple industries better understand and engage customers, Cloud4Wi stepped into the market in the year 2013. Its application suite provides brick and mortar businesses with accurate insights into customers’ in-store behavior, along with powerful, location-based marketing tools to engage them in meaningful ways, helping drive revenue in unprecedented ways.

Since the beginning, the founders of the organization understood that brick and mortar businesses were missing a huge opportunity to connect with their customers. Most businesses already had the WiFi infrastructure in place and they could have leveraged it to better understand and engage their customers. At the end, they were looking forward to say that WiFi could play a key role in transforming the customer experience.

Soon the organization was able to raise Series A funding with United Ventures, a European venture capitalist company, which helped it 26

to develop a powerful and robust guest WiFi platform. Then in 2017 the company closed $ 11.5 million Series B financing round.

Ground Breaking Solutions Cloud4Wi’s AI-driven application suite enables retailers to easily collect and manage the identity of their customers, in compliance with privacy regulations (for example, GDPR), and unearth in real time the behaviors of customers within their stores. With this in-depth knowledge of who the customers are and how they behave, retailers can empower their marketing strategies to reach the right audience, at exactly the right place and time, and through the right channel.

Cloud4Wi strives to be a data-driven SaaS company with a customer success approach (land, expand, renew) that empowers global retailers to: Ÿ Get to know their customers, turning them from anonymous visitors into loyal shoppers; Ÿ Understand offline customer behaviors with powerful analytics;

Ÿ

Bridge offline and online worlds to deliver better customer experiences.

The Massively Experienced Leader With the background in marketing, technology, and economics, with experience in the media-telco industry with a focus on nextgeneration networks and services Andrea Calcagno serves as the Chairman, CEO and Co-founder of Cloud4Wi. Till date he has led over 50 projects in this space, and has written multiple articles and reports when it comes to advanced wireless technologies. Calcagno kick started his career at Telecom Italia Labs in Turin. While serving for Telecom Italia labs, he performed advanced research and development activities on mobile access networks, receiving international patents on mobile broadband architectures. He has also played multiple key roles in several Italian start-ups. Later in 2003 he founded WiTech, where he served as CEO and EVP. Calcagno holds a Master’s degree in telecommunications engineering from University of Pisa.

June 2019|

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‘

We empower our clients to bridge the online and ofine worlds, through our cuttingedge location services.

‘‘

Rethinking the Concept of Store According to the organization, personalization of experience will be termed as the number one trend.

Shoppers nowadays expect to live compelling sharing experience while they are looking for something on the online store, or any store. Nowadays stores are becoming a place where customers can spend time by listening to music, eat great food, touch, feel and play with the product and above all, hang out with their friends, community and family. Which means now retailers must rethink their concept of store.

As per Cloud4Wi, in this re-designing process, retailers must seek inspiration from Generation Z. This generation is tech –innate; they can effortlessly “swim” in the digital world, and they are used to using technology in order to personalize their experiences.

Despite their young ages, they already hold unprecedented influence over family purchasing decisions and wield enormous economic power of their own. There are about 2.5 billion Gen Zs out of the 7.5 billion people currently in the world, and their spending power at close to $200 billion annually when you factor in their influence on parental or household purchases.

Andrea Calcagno Chairman, CEO & Co-founder

Retailers must prepare themselves for the unified commerce if they want to stay ahead of the game.

Cloud4Wi firmly believes that the physical stores still play a key role in delivering new meaningful customercentric experiences. As an organization, it is working hard to provide retailers with the best-in-class technologies, capable of building 360-degree customer views to bridge the gap between online and offline.

Testimonial “Cloud4Wi’s solution enables us to understand who our customers are and how they behave in the stores while respecting their privacy. Thanks to this in-depth knowledge, we will be able to deliver compelling and much more personalized experiences”. Lorenzo Bertelli, Owner and CDO, The Prada Group.

Future Roadmap When it comes to the future, Cloud4Wi believes, the evolutionary path in the retail market is well defined. |June 2019

27

IS THE

SINGLE BRAND Dead in MPS?

I

f you are an MPS provider, you may have realized the “single brand from a single vendor” solution is falling out of favor with end customers. So, what has changed and is MPS a sustainable offering?

As of 2018, we are 20-years into the bell curve for MPS. For many years, prospects were first time buyers who viewed their environments as messy. Printers and copiers were everywhere from different manufacturers and vendors.

Control was distributed among departments, Facilities, and IT. Acquisitions methods were just as diverse and included purchases, leases, contracts from local dealers and national supplies resellers.

Print was a big mystery to customers. They had no idea how many devices they had, how many pages they were producing or how much they were spending. They needed a clear picture of what they had and potential solutions. Then they struggled with satisfying all stakeholders and gaining consensus on a final solution. Projects were time consuming, political and even risky for the project lead.

You played a valuable role as an MPS vendor. In the customer’s eyes, you were the expert who taught them something new and showed them a path forward. You offered expertise and people to find out what they have today and were able to develop a complex solution. The journey took many months from concept to assessment to proposal. You earned the role of trusted advisor so it was only natural that the customer would see a “single brand from a single vendor” as the best available solution.

Pricing changed. You wrapped up the solution into bundled pricing that simplified costs for the end customer and

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enabled you to shield pricing for hardware, maintenance and supplies. After all, there were managed services wrapped around all products so the customer agreed with the bundled pricing format. Bundled pricing enabled you to work with margins behind the curtain.

Come decision time, the customer realized that Implementation would affect every user and the potential cost savings put it near the top for cost-savings initiatives.

These two factors elevated the project to the most senior management levels for approval and executive sponsorship.

The sales cycle got longer but the project became more important to more people. The final result was often a case study of successful transformation from a messy environment to a lean, managed print environment.

So, what changed in recent years? The MPS market had certainly matured. Customers had lived through the transformation from unmanaged to managed. With the end of their first MPS contract came a new perspective and different buyer attitude. The customer was no longer sick and in dire need of expertise. Their fleet was no longer messy. Devices had been consolidated and processes streamlined. Customers had clear visibility to what they devices they had, how many pages they produced, and the total cost of ownership. The mystery was solved.

Your role changed. In many cases, the customer was more experienced in real-world MPS than your sales team. Sales people struggled to teach customers something new, something of significant potential value. Talk of potential cost savings by switching vendors was no longer compelling – the big savings had already been taken. The MPS story from one vendor sounded the same as the other

June 2019|

Leadership Column

vendor – in fact, the story sounded exactly the same as the one told years earlier by their current MPS vendor.

Now the end customer was asking about your ability to support their existing fleet, to do repairs and provide consumables. The potential for placing your new hardware was not clear. These new MPS opportunities felt like they belonged more to the vendor service and inside sales teams than to the account sales department. The customer was now clearly in control and driving the sales process.

In the past few years, many dealers have exited the MPS market and refocused on their traditional selling motions.

They found MPS operations different and costly. Sales reps were harder to train and it took longer to get them hitting quota numbers. So, like a rubber band, dealers re-focused on their core competency. So, what does the future look like for those dealers wishing to stay relevant in the MPS market?

Ben Harris Founder Harris Technologies

It is time to look inward to tackle five key obstacles to growth and profitability in MPS: • Redefine your value and how you will educate the customer • Define a strategy for pricing and supporting both OEM and compatible supplies • Justify managed services independent of products • Learn how to participate in an open sourcing model • Decide if a fragmented customer environment and sourcing model is good business The days of single brand and single vendor are gone.

Sourcing methods have changed dramatically for everything – including print – and the pace of change is accelerating. Vendors must rethink the value provided and how to educate the customer. MPS vendors will still spend months doing assessments and proposals only to be faced with the purchasing process that would unbundle pricing and force transparency to price by product category. The decision then is can you re-invent your practice to enable you to participate in this new arena and win – profitably.

|June 2019

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ben Harris is the Founder of Harris Technologies, Inc. Ben Harris enjoyed a 15 year career in corporate sales, selling and implementing large contracts to Fortune 500 companies around the country. In 2006, he decided to begin a new journey, leaving the big office and tie to start up his own firm. After years of perseverance and dedication, Harris Technologies has become a recognized leader in their space.

29

The

Companies with Most

Retail Solutions 2019

Eurostop Helping the Retail Sector since Inception

B

ack in the 1990s, the UK witnessed the foundation of Eurostop, a company offering complete EPOS and retail software solutions.

Cut to 2019, the organization progressed rapidly to become a major force in the industry, offering solutions to many fashion, footwear, jewelry, and general merchandise retailers.

successfully develop and build his own business.

In 1970, Richard left Malacca for the UK where at Lady at Lord John, he rose to Merchandise Director within three years. Realizing the importance of IT, Richard then joined Honeywell Bull as a retail consultant. Here, his energy and passion enabled him to build relationships with colleagues that were to join him to make Eurostop the company it is today.

Eurostop’s experience and understanding of these retail sectors has enabled the organization to develop well established systems that allow its customers to manage their merchandise and business processes with efficiency and ease. In the last decade, Eurostop has successfully expanded into Asia, and established offices in Shanghai, Xiamen, Singapore and Hong Kong. These offices cater to the Asia Pacific market and help to service its global customer base.

Harnessing the Power of Clever Tech Richard firmly believes in remaining agile and adapting to changing consumer behavior and trends in order to remain relevant, all the while providing a consistent core service, which is based on accurate data and stock. Eurostop is now looking at clever use of technology to enhance the in-store experience, using tech and data to provide an on demand, mobile service for consumers.

When Dreams Come True While growing up in Malaysia, Richard Loh the CEO of Eurostop dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. At the age of 18, he joined the Graduate Trainee Programme at Bata Shoes, progressed to store manager, area manager and to head office as a merchandiser. Richard credits his retail training for the discipline in later life that enabled him to

Eurostop’s newest disruptive technology is an in-store consumer shopping app called MyShoppr™.

This consumer app was designed to merge offline and online seamlessly, embracing the trend for mobile shopping with the physical bricks and mortar experience. Another key development is the real time fulfillment capabilities of the Eurostop solution, where retailers can fulfill orders from any location

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within the business, ensuring that customers receive their orders swiftly.

Richard’s experience and enthusiasm for the retail sector, and the challenges that it faces, has shaped Eurostop’s success. Strategy is a mix of listening to customers, and looking at the wider market, to develop well-established systems to streamline the management of merchandise and business processes.

It’s about putting the consumers’ experiences first and foremost.

Lessons Learnt while Staying at the Forefront Richard has worked with multiple Tier 1 retailers over the years, and understands that a positive customer experience underpins every successful sale – evident today by Eurostop’s own business development and philosophy. With the blistering pace of technological advancements, Richard continues to keep Eurostop at the forefront of the market with his drive and enthusiasm, currently focusing on mobile technology and omnichannel.

Richard is also actively involved in leading the firm’s expanding operation in China where Eurostop’s largest customer, the sports brand Anta Sportswear, has more than 12,000 retail stores. Having achieved many of his goals, Richard now goes June 2019|

“Retail systems designed by retailers for retailers” - Eurostop’s EPOS, stock control and head ofce merchandising system and business intelligence software have all been designed with traditional merchandise ow processes in mind.

out of his way to give others opportunities and help them fulfill their potential.

Picture of the Future When it comes to the future, Eurostop listens to its customers, industry commentators and Richard has some strong opinions of his own, as to where the future of retail lies. Keeping an open mind as to what is possible is the key to maintain and develop any business, and the same is true for retail. Eurostop will continue to explore the possibilities of new technology, by always asking; ‘How can this make the customer experience better?’

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Richard Loh CEO

always been ‘how can we fix that or make that happen?’

We really do trust Eurostop to look after our business,”M&S International “Eurostop has made replenishment and fulfilment seamless. The automatic requests save us so much time, we can share stock easily across the warehouse and stores, and fulfil customer orders much faster. The resulting commercial success with our multichannel business is one of the key reasons why we won Drapers Independent Award.”- Base Fashion

Also, the organization’s integrated suite of software is constantly developing, and as a long-standing retail systems provider, Eurostop is well placed to support its retail partners as they grow, with the experience and infrastructure to support their expansion both locally and globally.

Clients’ Feedback “The Eurostop team did a great job working with our other third party vendors to get the seamless customer experience. Everything works more smoothly, transactions are faster and customer service is improved.

They are a truly collaborative vendor and never shy away from their responsibilities. Their approach has |June 2019

33

Industry Pointers

Critical Importance of

Digital Marketing in the growth of Start-ups

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June 2019|

R

unning a start-up is not as easy as it may seem. It requires giving attention to many things. One needs to perceive the evolving trends in the business world and adapt the business strategies accordingly so as to reach out to a larger audience. One should also have an entrepreneurship sense and competence to thrive in a constantly changing business world.

We live in an ultra –competitive world. If one does not evolve our strategy to reach out to people according to the changing trends then force of the time has the capacity to make one obsolete. That is the reason it is essential to adapt to the changing world and changing technologies. By being part of the solutions to the problems in the world one can make the world a better place.

The digital world we live in today, traditional marketing strategies are almost becoming obsolete. Today, customers use online platforms to get information on practically everything. Digital Marketing helps the startups to have their online presence and market themselves in a better way.

Digital marketing is important for start-up nowadays because it is a kind of successful business strategy to shine out. It is the very efficient route to reach out the larger audience by showcasing the services and products in the best possible manner.

The most valuable benefit of Digital Marketing for the startups is that they can maintain good communication with their target audience by regularly informing them about the events and happenings in their company at a very minimal cost through online platforms. The positively built image of the products and services of the start-up in the |June 2019

online world makes it possible to reach out to the maximum audience.

Digital marketing is vital for building brand image, creating traffic, more sales and gaining loyal customers. The sphere of digital marketing is much larger than traditional marketing strategies and most importantly it is cost-effective.

Digital marketing is a disruptive technology which provides the complete customer service starting from the product description to customer support.

Accomplishment of Businesses is in converting generated traffic into subscribers. Conversion rate is the most important parameter of Business success. Digital Marketing plays vital role in great conversion rate. This is the reason most entrepreneurs are giving priority to digital advertising tools to have maximum conversion rate.

Digital marketing uses a variety of information coupled with organized tools to analyze customer liking and their behavior, which helps to perceive new trend, see new opportunities and gaining future insights.

Various Digital Marketing platforms or technologies include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Optimization (SMO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Content Management System (CMS), Email Marketing, Social Media Networks, Content Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Apps and Classic Apps, Blogs and different video channels. All these platforms operate in Internet Medium. There are other

classic methods of Digital Marketing such as TV advertisement, Radio Medium & SMS. All these various Internet and Classic Digital Marketing platforms create rapid and viable communications with the maximum and desired audiences and helps in ensuring higher conversion rates. Due to these higher conversion rates it becomes possible to generate great revenues. These various platforms have the great potential to ensure good communication with consumers.

Digital Marketing opens growth options for small and medium businesses also in very good proportion. The digital marketing modes are more customizable and cheaper. The presence of one’s brand and service on various platforms gives the option to consumers to rate business services as per their experience level. The favorable feedback given by a satisfied consumer helps in generating new customers and increasing more conversion rates. This is the most important benefit of online presence of one’s brand.

Strategic digital marketing helps start-ups growth in many ways such as: Ÿ Global Trade Possibility Ÿ Cost-effective Marketing Ÿ Image and Brand formation 35

Fast Communication More Online Visibility, Name, Fame Ÿ More contribution and more impact Ÿ More Revenue, Status, Reputation, Growth, Prestige

Ÿ Ÿ

Essentially Digital marketing strategy helps in new customer acquisitions, brand visualization, growth, more revenue-generating possibilities, better customer service, and cost-effective global presence.

Digital Marketing is the heart and soul in the growth of the start-ups and is the best way to reduce costs on marketing without reducing the outreach of the products and services. Therefore, when a start-up creates its business plan, it must include a solid digital marketing strategy.

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The future of digital marketing appears incredibly bright at present.

This battle to promote one’s own brand is possible in a more impactful way by using Digital Marketing.

Digital Marketing can help different brands create big impact on consumers.

To survive in an ultra-competitive business world is only possible if one can plan and implement an effective, unique and pragmatic digital marketing strategy for one’s business to make a huge impact on the maximum customers.

Appropriate understanding and proficient inclusion of best digital marketing processes and such trends has the capacity to ensure the sustainable, holistic and economic growth of start-ups and even already existent businesses.

June 2019|

The

Companies with Most

Retail Solutions 2019

Transforming Merchandising through Cloud Computing

C

onsumer Goods Manufacturers and Grocers nowadays are deliberately employing disruptive technologies to meet the heightened consumer’s demand and adding agility to their services. A new generation of computing is disrupting how consumer goods are merchandised, displayed, priced and stocked on shelves. Lines between manufacturers, distributors, retailers and consumers continue to transform and require manufacturers to deploy a new set of solutions to thrive in a direct to consumer economy.

Packaged Goods Industry is facing numerous challenges; Digital consumer is one of them. Digital consumer is shaping the move to Omni-channel which empowers the consumer with more products choices, reviews, information on promotions, and product availability with traditional physical shelves and digitally with CPG companies directly.

To provide best possible services to support multiple channels of distribution, companies are adopting customer-relationship management software built to suit vertical specific requirements and enable companies to engage with its potential customers in better ways. To gain efficiency in business operations this feat needs a precise CRM solution. Recognized by leading analyst firms including Gartner and industry publications Consumer 38

Goods Technology, Ivy Mobility is a CRM solution provider which is powering the CPG industry by delivering applications through multiple cloud apps.

Evolving Vision Founded with a vision to develop preferable software for the mobile workforce Ivy Mobility launched into the market in 2002. Since its inception many multinational companies have trusted on Ivy solutions for a wide range of work functions using mobile device technology. These best in class mobile device technologies have helped many companies to increase revenue, shorten sales cycles, improve customer service, and enhancing employee productivity. Five years ago, the company decided to focus on cloud solutions for the Consumer Packaged Goods Industry. With this new approach the company quickly introduced new products, for Retail Execution and Direct Store Delivery, and are currently available using a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

An Instrumental Leadership Rajiv Prabhakar, Founder and Director of Ivy Mobility have a extensive experience in consulting and resolving business problems. Rajiv is instrumental in delivering solutions to transform the sales, and distribution operations of CPG companies, enabled by cloud solutions. Before founding

Ivy, Rajiv has delivered his expert guidance from Gap Inc Direct, Internet Movie Retailing pioneer Reel.com, CMOS Soft in the Bay Area to Pyramid Business Systems in Singapore. In addition to this, Rajiv has advised over 100 businesses to increase market share by solving challenges with product placement, stocking, pricing, and offer promotional discounts to drive more category performance.

Innovative Offerings By way of new technologies, Ivy’s vision is to be the finest customer centric provider in mobile solutions, and empower the customers through software to improve work by using any device, at any time and in anyplace.

Ivy seeks to digitalize all processes related to the information flow for route to market, for consumer good product manufacturers and distributors, via a Software‐as‐a‐Service (SaaS) and artificial intelligence available in the cloud.

Cutting-edge Capabilities Ivy Industry Cloud is a single unified platform for Consumer Package Goods organizations and includes sales, delivery, merchandising, distribution management, and analytics. To make it more reliable the company is embedding Artificial Intelligence to power automation and insights. With it, June 2019|

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‘

‘

Ivy is rst to market the Industry Cloud for Consumer Goods.

Rajiv Prabhakar customers can predict which SKU should go on which shelf and in what quantity.

The company has developed a solution for industry-specific business processes for the Consumer Goods Industry; the Industry Cloud. Its applications are available on the Salesforce AppExchange Marketplace. Today, Ivy’s solutions enable over 45 manufacturers and distributors in more than 29 countries to realize the benefits of modern cloud-based architectures and mobile applications for their route to market business functions.

While describing about its customer relationship management the company officials state that “We offer best in class professional services and product support to our customers. The customer relationship management solutions empower the customers to increase the productivity of their field sales force.” The retail execution solution enables customers to transform operations by reducing out of stock situations and improving promotion performances. This is the unique capability to support a global enterprise with a single system by adding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in the applications.

Founder & Director

in the world. It builds industry-specific software delivered in the cloud and offers multi-functional capabilities to meet the vertical needs of consumer goods companies. It helps organizations to overcome challenges in routes to market the customers face today and tomorrow.

Ivy solutions use the Salesforce Platform, combined with their own proprietary technology. In addition, to effectively support customers the company offers the option of using Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. It has designed specific applications for mobile device platforms; which support Android phones and tablets, Apple iPads and phones. The company also intendeds on developing more capabilities to support Windows tablets and phones too. Ivy believes the data generated from its industry-specific applications can provide unique insights that can be incorporated into its solutions, further increasing the value of solutions.”

Industry-specific Solutions Ivy’s solutions provide industry-specific process support, robust functionality which includes built-in workflow processes, rules, and best practices specific to the Consumer Goods Industry. Everything from the user interface, support for industry regulations, to the product’s nomenclature is industry specific. Businesses are relying more heavily on vertical solutions to address the demands of current economic climates and are looking forward to take advantage of the next generation of the technology.

Ivy serves some of the leading consumer goods companies |June 2019

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June 2019|

Expert’s Insights

One Stop Shop for Professionals on the Go

T

he world of fashion and retail is going through continuous changes; it seems as if as soon as anyone gets a new system set up, it changes again. There is more confusion than there are remedies. Old timers, as well as new fashion houses, have either down sized or completely closed their doors in the recent years.

Every time someone reads an article from so-called professionals, they notice even more emphasis on customer service; although customer service is an important part of the business, by now it is pretty much a standard procedure throughout high end retailers.

If we review all businesses in general, what we notice is that those who are succeeding, at least comparing to most others, have certain elements in common and one in particular: value.

Operations, such as TJ Maxx, are |June 2019

growing and forcing most other department stores to become irrelevant.

Major specialty European chains, such as ZARA or H&M, deliver fashion, a cool place to shop, as well as value.

They are taking market share from their U.S. competitors season after season. Most U.S. stores, up until the closures began a couple of years ago, were forced by Wall Street to grow without any concern for profitability.

There is a very big conflict with most top executive’s interests and actual business models. They are expected to grow the top line first, so that the chains and other retailing majors continue over saturating all U.S. markets with their foot prints; only to be rewarded on the short-term, while their tenure may last. When they left, they also left a less manageable and more challenging business for the next group to navigate; they kicked the can down the road.

The biggest challenge for the larger companies is the fact that everyone wants to tweak the business, rather than reviewing all nuts and bolts of their model. Now, discounters must give department stores a run for their money, and some Europeans are doing the same to U.S. chains; no one is willing to take a major risk, they are not even looking at those issues and who can blame them for being scared?

As for the smaller “mom and pop shops,” unless they can come up with something other than trying to buy better or give a better customer service, their years will be numbered in all major markets. There was a time where there were a few boutiques on most New York City blocks, but today, aside from just a few, they nearly are all gone. Those models would likely still work for suburbs where those major chains do not find it profitable to have a presence.

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About the Author At the age of 24, fashion designer Bahram Hakakian opened his first retail location, BARAMI, with a vision of giving women what they deserve out of fashion. Now, founder Bahram Hakakian, aka BARAMI, and his three daughters are proud to announce the new direction of their fashion empire, by creating a wholesale collection as Patrizia Luca. Their collection is being sold within a wide variety of specialty stores, Technology has forced retailers and businesses to look into e-commerce, however, most have not yet discovered how to make it profitable.

With online return rates being an average 35%, restocking and putting items back into their original shape could become a labor-intensive process; all assuming the items are unused upon their return. Shopping online, while great for technology purchases, gives no personal immediate gratification. Shopping for fashion has been an outing for many individuals, to bond with friends and family. We keep hearing different ratios of numbers of online selling versus brick and mortar selling. According to the co-author of Conversion Optimization, Khalid Saleh, in 2018, 8.9% of all retail sales in the U.S. came from online selling. This meant there were still another 91% of sales that went 42

to brick and mortar operations; a rather large number. If we also take into account that between 20,000 to 25,000 stores have closed their doors in the past few years and split those sales through their remaining stores, the potential becomes even greater.

ZARA, and its counterparts, have effected every country in the globe. All this, while registering success and growth year after year. They deliver fashion at a good price, however, they are focused mostly on a trimmer woman and a younger generation. American women are sized, on average, between a fourteen and a sixteen; most cannot shop that type of product.

This leaves a space open for fashion in the U.S. that is made for individuals actually residing in the U.S. What needs to be looked at, is an exciting collection that will not be all over specialty chains and is done for the U.S. market. Most U.S. stores have their customers trained to buy when they are running sales; when the merchandise is marked up merely to be marked down. In other value oriented chains, they market at the price that they want to sell and when they run a sale for a limited time, the stores get packed. We often notice that most of these stores remove their staple items from their sales floor during sale period, while adding other leftover, or older items, to the sales floor. Thus, changing a customer’s perception and retraining them to buy at full price will become a daunting task that will put most chains in a nowin situation.

One would like to assume the landscape will change within the next decade or so, since we will be evolving as each year passes.

Barami Hakakian BARAMI stores

June 2019|

The

Companies with Most

Retail Solutions 2019

Protect Retail & CPG’s Premier Prescriptive Analytics Provider

B

ased in Burlington, less than 15 miles outside of Boston, Profitect is a software firm offering an award-winning prescriptive analytics solution. The solution uniquely processes data to automatically identify opportunities for improvement, and provides a prescriptive action informing the appropriate stakeholder(s), in plain language, how to act on each opportunity. The vision of Profitect is to reduce the amount of reports that inundate retail and CPG employees, in addition to being inefficient, inaccurate, and prone to personal bias.

Profitect also aims to empower employees “at the edge” in order to make more informed decisions by telling them what they should know, instead of sending them a report to analyze, and prescribing the actions they should take. This quickly and consistently improves sales and margins while reducing labor costs.

A Closer Look at Prescriptive Analytics Profitect’s award-winning prescriptive analytics solution leverages pattern detection, pragmatic Artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine learning to identify opportunities within data that impact sales and margin. The organization analyzes data to identify areas for improvement including: inventory and pricing inaccuracies, inconsistent on-shelf availability, unsellable merchandise, vendor noncompliance, and assortment discrepancies. Profitect then delivers 44

these opportunities to the appropriate stakeholder(s) with simple, plain-text corrective actions for resolving them.

The solution’s machine learning and AI capabilities help the system “learn from” each outcome to hone future results. It is designed to serve every department across the retail and CPG value chain, including supply chain, store operations, loss prevention, marketing, merchandising, finance, planning and allocation, and information technology.

Consistently Understanding Clients' Needs and Objectives Profitect’s Customer Success team holds frequent meetings and check-ins with customers to ensure they are consistently realizing value and their needs and objectives are being met.

Additionally, the company holds quarterly calls and hosts a yearly user conference, Prescriptive Analytics Collaborative Training (PACT), to ensure communication and collaboration across its customer community. The organization also routinely hosts meetings of its Product Management Committee, which is a select group of customers and Profitect’s own Research & Development team who share feedback to refine the company's award-winning prescriptive analytics solution.

on several of the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA)’s Leaders Councils, which offer further insights into what retailers and CPG organizations need from an analytics provider. Profitect uses everything it learns to hone and refine its solution.

The Veteran Leader As the CEO of Profitect, Guy Yehiav is responsible for setting the organization's growth and leadership strategy. Guy is a 25-year veteran of the supply chain industry, and has held senior leadership positions at Oracle after founding Demantra US, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006. He is also a frequent contributor to Forbes, Money Inc, Retail Touchpoints, Women's Wear Daily, RIS News, Total Retail, The Profit Chain, and Loss Prevention Magazine. Additionally, he is proud to sit on several leadership councils. Guy received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science & Industrial Management from Shenkar College of Israel and completed his MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College in Massachusetts.

While working in the supply chain industry, Guy learned three important lessons that he brought with him to Profitect: Offer an efficient deployment: He believes one needs to offer their customers an implementation that takes days, not months or a year. Ÿ Keep solutions simple: According to Guy, overcomplicated solutions

Ÿ

Profitect’s team attends 20+ global industry conferences and events every year in order to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and challenges affecting retail and CPG. The CEO himself sits

June 2019|

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‘

We are very proud of our prescriptive analytics solution, which has received numerous retail industry awards for being more intuitive, effective, and user-friendly than the ‘traditional’ solutions it replaces at some of the world’s leading retailers and CPG organizations.

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are not scalable, so he made sure Profitect could be used by anyone and everyone and anywhere, whether parttime or full-time, elderly or young, skilled or unskilled. Ÿ Support services should always be free: Vendors can't nickel-and-dime their customers, Guy says. Profitect is committed to helping its customers succeed, and that's not something that should be charged as an added service. The vendor and the customer must work together for both to succeed. So, all support services are included free of charge in every Profitect agreement. Ÿ

Future Roadmap and Sustaining Competency When it comes to the future, Profitect wants to replace the paradigm of reporting within the retail industry. The company's solution has a very loyal following in the United States, so its next step is to expand its international presence. It is seeking to build upon its current business in the U.S., Europe, South Africa, and Israel, and may also expand into the Pacific region as well, due to interest in Australia.

Guy Yehiav CEO

Client Feedback “We were aware of Profitect’s reputation in the market as a leader, which is why we brought the team in to pitch, but it was really the first demonstration of their prescriptive analytics product that sold us.” Peter Enman, Loss Prevention Manager, Sobeys Inc. “We started partnering with Profitect back in 2014. Today we have about 200 million lines of data running through the system daily, with 5,000 users. That’s 5,000 people that can take action on data, much faster than before.” Chris Adams, VP Category Management Services, Ahold Delhaize Company “Profitect integrates sales data from the register to allow for greater visibility and control of sales behaviors to identify fraud, compliance, pricing, and associate efficiency.”

Michelle Neal, Director of Operations, Sunglass Hut NA (As told to RIS News, January 2019)

A key priority for Profitect is maintaining its culture as it grows. Profitect is proud of the culture that it has built over the years, prioritizing work-life balance and diversity with a customer-first focus. If a customer needs support any time, Profitect's team is always ready to step in to help. Whether it's training, maintenance, or anything else, Profitect's culture emphasizes doing the right thing and making sure its customers are realizing maximum value at all times.

|June 2019

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Industry Trends

Key POS

Trends

Reshaping

the Retail

I

n recent times, the retail industry hasn’t seen a more exciting invention since the invention of cash register.

With new and innovative technologies helping shape both online and offline experiences for consumers, the landscape is continuously changing in a way which was unimaginable even few years back. The best part is that there seems to be no end of the innovation, which only influencing the purchase decision of the consumers.

Nowadays the main focus of retailers is to create a safe, engaging, and unique shopping experience for its consumers, it’s very important for the retailers to understand the importance of Big Data and in-store analytics and adapting to the cloud. With the retail industry at the verge of massive transformation, we are listing out few key trends that everyone needs to know to be successful in the ecosystem that is transforming quickly.

Multi-system Integration Multi-system integration with various applications gets the utmost priority from top retailers. Most of the retailers list out POS integration with other applications as a key priority alongside the implementation of dynamic marketing content through mobile devices. This is mostly due to the retailer’s interest to store all the customer information and purchase history in a database, which is completely centralized that could be easily integrated with multiple applications.

However, in order to do that, a retailer needs to use an ERP database that can handle all these.

Speed People always look for quick solutions for everything. A clock starts ticking the moment a customer enters, no matter how good the product is, if the process is slow and the attention to details are missing, then customers will leave 46

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disappointed. As a retailer, one cannot please everyone, but with a modern and efficient POS, the service can be improved. A modern POS simplifies the communication between various departments and can save a lot of time for both the retailer and the customer respectively.

Managing Stocks Keeping and managing inventory is a nightmare for most of the retailers, and it’s quite natural. Managing inventory is a never-ending task and takes a lot of effort, time, and manpower. However, it is quite important to manage inventories when it comes to long-time survival. An efficient POS system always makes the process of managing the inventory much easier. The best part of a POS is, one can monitor the status of stocked items, shipped products, and new orders anytime. This is a huge time saver for a cumbersome and a tedious process, and eventually helps retailers to focus on other important aspects of running the business.

Customized Experience With POS systems, retailers just need to provide personalization that scoops out every shopper. Every passing year, retailers are adapting to personalized technology solutions that allow an interactive user experience. Thanks to the emergence of all new mobile POS technology, now retailers can offer its customers more choices to accommodate their shopping habits by letting them to complete transactions anywhere in the store. Now with the invention of improved POS marketers and customer service teams can contact the buyer at each point of their purchase decision. With so much data retailers and consumers can have better customer service, quicker payment processes and access to better offers and real-time personalization.

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Promotions and Marketing at its Best Nowadays with the advent of digital technology, marketing involves maintaining a digital presence as well. A POS can integrate all the advertised offers with transactions, making it easier to keep track of all the campaigns. Additionally, it can integrate with CRM and track customer behavior. When an offer gets popular among the masses, then the retailer will see it in his transaction data.

Usage of Big Data analytics In order to compete with e-commerce, retailers are now taking the help of Big-Data and in store analytics just to have a better idea about what’s happening inside the store.

Big-Data analytics helps retailers to track how frequently a specific item moves from shelf to shopping cart allows retailers to know the trends that are dominant in the market.

Analytics helps the retail industry in a big way to better understand consumer purchase pattern and behaviors.

Keeping Track of Employees To run a business smoothly a retailer, need few people. A POS system enables to manage them with great accuracy.

With a Point of Sale system in place, employees can sign on or off easily and the system will automatically log their work hours and break hours.

Security Above all, a POS system offers great security protections that help keeping customer data safe. Retail stores and businesses are always prime targets for Cyber Criminals, and a data breach is not good for a business. So, by using standard encryption and firewall, businesses can be secured from cyber-attacks and customers can swipe their cards with a peace of mind.

So, here we have listed out few of the POS trends that will shape the future of the retail industry. As we look ahead, these trends will be on focus for both retailers and customers. The main advantage of an advanced POS system is greater efficiency and optimization, it links all the departments together which eventually allows to have better control over the inventory, better profitability, and to manage processes in an efficient way.

|June 2019

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