Business Management of IT for Competitive Advantage in Retail
Introduction
Where is IT used in the supply chain now?
What efficiencies are gained using IT systems?
How is business to business communication achieved on a large international scale?
How is back office information collected and used for competitive advantage?
Consolidation of the Warehouses
This reduces the number of product movements from supplier to store.
Can your store operate a subset of point of sale terminals in the event of a blackout.
Can the store continue operations with external telecommunications down?
Self Service Point of Sales POS
Can multiple customers take care of the sales transactions under staff supervision?
Can customer loyalty cards be used for receipt emailing, data mining and customized customer marketing?
Can blade servers and virtualization be used to lower power, cooling, space and energy costs?
Can the heavy processing activities be completed an night or off peak times?
Ducted and sealed equipment racks can making cooling systems more efficient.
Variable speed compressors can control temperature and humidity more accurately.
Is there enough fuel and water for power blackouts? This includes resupply contracts.
Is there a fail over path? Is it acceptable and has it been tested regularly?
Can Unix systems be converted to Linux systems to save on costs?
Service Oriented Architecture SOA
This tries to create business software services structure that can work together. Its advantage include:
Legacy systems may be modified or defined to allow SOA calls for information and exchange.
Modules from different platforms can communicate if the SOA structures are known.
New services and functions can be created quickly leveraging existing SOA structure.
Business to business communication can use SOA.
Can the store POS system and web store POS share some SOA modules?
Web Methods 8 is a form of SOA that includes the programming language, network interfaces and web interfaces.
IBM Web Sphere is another example that can be used for SOA.
SOA systems can be transplanted between industries quickly. iTunes and pre paid phone funds top ups are examples.
SOA can be used across multiple systems to gather customer intelligence.
Using SOA can help with creating a consistent graphical user interface online and in store.
Companies can create SOA systems to allow easier business to business communication. Optus provides SOA interfaces for business clients for a competitive advantage.
Thin Client use for distributed business access
Thin clients allow smaller wide area network connections while still maintaining full functionality.
Multiple sites can access a single data centre / server room using thin clients.
Thin clients use less power than desktop or laptops and do not need refresh replacement cycles.
Thin clients do not store data locally and can be replaced without advanced IT skills if broken.
Business Software and Hardware choices
Does your operation have any system lock ins with equipment suppliers?
Will this lock in reduce future flexibility and potential higher service fees later on.
Centralised Buying Competitive Advantage
1. This can help with economies of scale.
2. Better trading terms can be gained if buying in bulk.
3. Transport of goods is more efficient in bulk.
Business Management of Supply Chain
Reducing the number of days a product is on hand can improve profits.
Can the days of stock on hand be optimised to be below the terms of trade accounts with suppliers?
To achieve this requires IT systems that look at seasonal store trends and daily stock changes.
Some of this information can be feed back to suppliers to prepare them for future orders.
Transport times between suppliers, warehouses and stores can be used in calculations.
Automatic ordering can be achieved once the intelligent IT systems are in place.
Benefits include less warehouse volumes needed. Little top of shelves packing and unpacking is required.
Disadvantages include little margin of error in cases such as un-seasonal weather or road blockages.
Accurate monitoring of the real stock levels needed. This includes losses to used by dates, spoilage and theft.
Wifi handheld stock control devices can be used to check or update real stock level versus recorded stock levels.
Extra revenues can be gained using online trading of goods.
Usability, data integrity, system performance and identity confirmation need to be best practice.
Testing cycles throughout development is desired to confirm the goals are defined correctly and meet.
Can the web interfaces handle multiple currencies and tax laws? Unicode can be used for multiple languages.
Business management of the IT implementations is required to confirm the business needs are achieved efficiently.
New systems require staff training.
Training can be external or internal to suit needs and numbers.
Internal staff progression with training and responsibilities helps create a challenging happy work environment.
What technology mix will create your competitive advantage?