Overview

Challenges Retail Companies Face Today

Retailers are increasingly focusing on their core business to enhance top-line performance. Innovation, cost savings, and operational consolidation are imperatives to address rising consumer demand, increased competition, fragmented markets, scomplex global supply chains, and product portfolios. In addition, retailers face challenges such as:

  • In-store – Non-standardized processes result in a high degree of fragmentation, inefficient labor management, stock outs, and shrinkages
  • Customers – Respond to changing customer preferences and pressure to deliver better value
  • Technology – Disparate systems and applications and limited integration
  • External challenges – Seasonal variations in the business, intense competition, variable local/ regional spending power, and suppliers' pressure on margins

BPM Offerings for Retail Industry

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How Infosys BPM Drives Value for Retail Organizations

Infosys BPM has invested significantly in domain and technology to create a range of transformational solutions that address context, store, customer-centricity, and analytics needs. Our solutions are geared to impact SG&A through cost arbitrage, impact COGS by variabilizing cost and free up working capital, and finally, enhance revenue through business insight and high-end analytics.

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Our BPM Services for Retail

Finance and accounting

The retail industry needs to streamline its finance and accounting processes to address challenges such as market saturation, intense competition, high customer expectations, sub-optimal operations, non-standard processes, reliance on manpower, lack of a single version of the truth, and disparate systems.

Infosys' solution enables consolidation and standardization of operations. Our flexible and scalable operating model enhances process efficiency, frees up cash locked in systems, and drives synergies between process and technology cost-effectively.

Human resources

Retailers must focus on lean inventories, store solutions, lower payroll, and other strategies to improve cash flow. People are the driving force behind all transactions in retail outlets. Hence, it is imperative for retailers to adopt a proactive approach to human resource management (HRM).

Infosys combines end-to-end HRM capabilities with a wide range of solutions in the hire-to-retire cycle to help retailers achieve their HR goals.

Procurement

The decentralized processes of retailers result in insufficient spend visibility, analysis, and higher maverick spend, leading to revenue leakage, vendor conflicts, higher expenses, and lack of operational and business metrics.

Infosys' Source-to-Pay solution designs customized, standard and centralized procurement processes that ensure compliance and monitor spend management. Our solution improves visibility, enhances processes, and ensures sustainable sourcing.

Lean store solution

The Infosys BPM retail practice adopts 'lean manufacturing' pioneered by Toyota. Our lean store solution covers the following three key areas of retail store operations:

In-store layout

An optimal store layout maximizes sales per square foot. A store plan that understands the nature of the products sold in the store improves visibility, movement across the store, visual merchandising, and the checkout process. Infosys BPM offers store planning solutions for assortment planning and space optimization to enhance the shopping experience.

In-store merchandising

Merchandising is not confined to the arrangement of products on a retail shelf. Rather, it takes into account the entire customer experience journey – from the time of entry into the store till exit – and understands shopping patterns. Our solution optimizes the macro and micro retail space with planograms and store-specific assortment analytics. Our 'pull vs. push' strategy combined with relevant data and analytics, and compliance monitoring enhances the customer experience.

In-store labor

Determining staffing levels is a crucial decision in retail operations that affect profitability, quality of service, and experience at stores. Our solution enables consolidation of the labor-management process outside the store, freeing up store personnel from non-value-added assignments. Our integrated workforce management system reduces labor costs, improves return on investment, reduces customer queues, and the amount of time spent by store managers on payroll and labor scheduling.

Benefits

  • Frees up vital resources for value-added activities
  • Implements a consistent method of work that delivers the right merchandising, product, people, and leadership through technology
  • Maximizes shelf availability and product visibility

Sales and fulfillment

Rising consumer expectations, tailored shopping experience, and increased costs are some of the challenges faced by retailers. Retailers need to transform their businesses and optimize costs to improve time-to-market, provide an enhanced shopping experience, and pass on cost savings to customers.

Infosys BPM sales and fulfillment solution helps retailers save costs, improve customer experience, and gain a competitive advantage by enhancing inventory turns and reducing cycle times with a global operating model.

Master data management

Master data management (MDM) presents a unique challenge to retailers due to the large volume of items, vendors and customers, and frequent changes to item attributes. Multiple legacy systems and disparate ownership of item attributes complicate the maintenance of accurate data records.

Infosys BPM master data management solution creates a robust and responsive master data foundation. Our MDM solution manages data across items, vendors and customers to ensure data quality. It consolidates disparate and conflicting records to provide users with a unified and accurate master data.

The Infosys BPM-IDLM platform solution leverages deep domain expertise and predictable offshore delivery capabilities of Infosys BPM and TIBCO's Collaborative Information Manager (CIM) and partner products to provide a unified view of data across the enterprise. It ensures process discipline in information management.

Benefits

  • Reduces time-to-market with the ability to set up new items, suppliers and customers faster
  • Provides an integrated view across the enterprise, enabling innovation and faster introduction of products
  • Reduces downstream supply chain inefficiencies through improved data quality and ownership
  • Ensures better control and visibility of supplier, product and customer data
  • Helps key client resources to focus on critical business and customer-facing processes
  • Ensures consolidation-driven efficiencies and process improvements
  • Reduces costs by leveraging the Infosys Global Delivery Model
  • Ensures integration of inorganic growth with a rapidly scalable operating model
  • Enables robust and predictable implementation by combining technology and integration expertise
  • Adopts a phased implementation approach based on the client's process maturity and financial requirements
  • Offers flexible hosting options including in-firewall and vendor-hosted models

Retailers outsource functions of consumer interaction and support to reduce costs, without affecting the quality of customer service. A majority of customer interactions involve loyalty program administration, campaign management, online sales support, catalog sales support, and post-sales product or service support. We have a robust portfolio of clients whom we support across multiple shifts and geographies, enabling significant cost savings.

Infosys BPM offers a wide range of analytical service offerings across the retail value chain:

  • Research – Industry analysis and competitor analysis
  • Store sales analysis – Store revenue and profitability analysis, store promotions analysis, and in-store intervention analysis
  • Product analysis – SKU performance, new product performance, and promotion effectiveness
  • Customer analysis – Customer spend analysis, market basket analysis, and credit risk analysis

The reporting and automation feature and data analysis for strategy development are based on:

  • Shopper analytics
  • Store operations
  • Merchandising and buying
  • Marketing
  • Online channels
  • Retail private label credit programs

The Infosys BPM Knowledge Services team provides deep insights and futuristic, profitable business models such as store sales model (store revenue and profitability analysis, localized promotion planning, and store claims analysis), customer analysis model (customer spend analysis, market basket analysis, and credit risk analysis) and promotion effectiveness modeling.

Benefits

  • Identifies opportunities for additional business value
  • Helps businesses make informed decisions
  • Provides a snapshot of operations through end-to-end reporting services

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