The Power of IT Solutions for the Retail Industry

By Rajat Kesarwani| Friday, November 26, 2021 10:30 AM | 4 min read

The new-age consumers are shifting from retail to e-tail. IT solutions for the retail industry are a must and the traditional retailers need to change their business models to keep up the pace and emerge as digital merchandisers.

It is a time where the retailers have to stay at pace with the thought process of the consumers. The current time retail segment is completely dependent on the information available. Thus, information technology is here to play a big role in the success story of the retail industry.

An Overview of Retail Industry

Retailers are struggling with constant development challenges. The future of retail business requires contactless digital customer engagement. It is time to unlock the potential for a more sustainable business model to meet the rise in customer demands and intensified cost pressure.

Digital technologies, like hybrid cloud, automation, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, etc. is sure to accelerate a business model. Retailers are required to emerge as smarter, more agile, and to be ready to face challenges with varied customer needs.

Challenges Faced by Retail Enterprises

Retailers have to face many challenges to get transform themselves into a digital enterprise. IT solutions for the retail industry have to manage:

• Designing in-house to support innovations and profitability
• To ensure momentum and profitability with timely promotional activities
• To ensure engagement and loyalty of the customers, along with maintaining the brand loyalty
• Carrying day-to-day operations with transparency, and keeping the company’s compliance and governance
• To create a competitive niche in the hyper-competitive industry
• Identifying cost-saving opportunities, with end-to-end management and analytics, all across the organization

Package Development Model Salesforce

In the traditional development model, metadata is stored as managed packages installed from AppExchange, or as unpackaged metadata.

Unpackaged metadata contains all the metadata belonging to a custom app. Therefore, the data isn’t isolated and organized, which makes metadata difficult to understand, upgrade, and maintain. While in the Package Development Model Salesforce, unpackaged metadata is organized into well-defined packages. Thus the goal is to create packages with directories that are versionable, easy to maintain, updated, and upgraded.

Media & Entertainment IT Solutions

Disruptive technology and the changed consumer behavior have transformed the entire media and entertainment industry. Traditional business models are struggling with revenue and profitability challenges. Most consumers are increasingly streaming content online and attending events virtually. To meet the customer’s expectations, there is a need to evolve a faster supply chain from content production and delivery to consumption.

Some of the important factors where Media & Entertainment IT Solutions have to take care of are:

• To launch various campaigns to attract consumers to the business digital platform with the help of a journey-based approach for campaign operations. Also to watch to maximize effectiveness, relevance in the most cost-effective manner.
• To accelerate media companies to shift from traditional infrastructure to the cloud ensuring reliable and high-quality services at scale, along with unlocking the benefits for the industry.
• To modernize and automate content supply chains through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Also to unify communications between various components.
• To help media platforms in real-time insights and analytics for responding to different unplanned events and thereby increasing consumer engagement.

Five IT Solutions for Retail Industry

Some innovative steps for IT solutions are:

1. Business Intelligence and Big Data: Retail analytics capture the attention of major stakeholders in the retail sector. It helps to remain in competition with brand promotion techniques. Retailers can use solutions by retail analysis across various channels to positively influence their sales. Business analytics solutions can rightly be termed as the pulse of intelligent retailing. It is an essential offering for the smaller retailers as well, who can be benefitted by leveraging this approach on various channels to understand the pulse of the market.

2. Retail Mobile Apps: Constant changing consumer behavior and the marketing adaptations by the retailers are the two most important factors to go for mobile apps. Mobile devices satisfy the expectations of the easy obtainability of technology, communication networks, and various other needs of modern society. Mobile apps can transform completely the ways of doing things across all domains of the retail industry.A small innovative effort in personalizing the retail mobility solutions can make a huge difference with the future business prospects and can bring more customer satisfaction.

3. CRM Solutions: More retailers are watching for customer relationship management. CRM solutions are mandatory ingredients in the success of a retail business. CRM solutions can utilize information technology to use customer data and to interact with the customers in detail. This is a noble medium to maintain a regular, long-term, continuous relationship with the clients, and make them loyal to a brand.

4. ERP Solutions: enterprise Resource Planning is another important solution for the retail industry. Dreamstel offers the most promising mobile ERP solutions to rule the retail industry. Implementing ERP solutions assure a promising future with a productive, efficient, and profitable retail business. Mobility and ERP are the two most happenings innovations and are more fruitful for retailers when both of these are combined to set a new rule in the retail industry.

5. Beacons and iBeacons: Since the last few years, retailers have understood the returns of proximity marketing. Big names in the retail industry have taken fast steps combining beacons with retail analytics to set a new field altogether. Beacons have completely transformed the ways of communication indoors. Campaigns based marketing is getting more fruitful and accurate with the help of deep analysis of consumer behavior and geofencing. New technologies like Bluetooth offer a high speed, good range, and better broadcasting capabilities boosting retail beacons.

Retail IT Solutions

The retail market is witnessing a sturdy rise in the customer’s expectations, along with the tough competition in the global market. Working in a niche market retailers are required to solve issues like efficient inventory systems, complex supply chains, along with competition with mass-market retailers. Dreamstel has been harnessing the retail business with Salesforce Consulting to help cater large retail client base.