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Retail Moving on Cloud
December 24, 2014 by Leave a Comment
In the business of Technologically Transforming Retail Landscapes, CitiXsys Technologies has been involved in bringing valuable content to 
readers for some years now. This white paper is intended for all who have experienced, observed and appreciate the value of Modern Retail Technology, Integrated Store experience and are keenly looking forward to commit to the concept of Cloud in Retail.
Modern Day Retail stores must offer shopper’s seamless Retail experiences, something that can’t be experienced online, to become preferred destinations. On the other hand retailers need to re-examine their strategy to provide a seamless experience across the entire customer-buying journey by diminishing the boundaries between online and physical world.
Download our Whitepaper on Cloud to know how cloud can transform retail operations and bring plenty of benefits to a retail organization.
Retailers have long set out on the journey to innovate realizing the absolute necessity of being truly seamless – maximizing the power and promise of technology across all channels, and across the Retail enterprise. But where should a retailer focus and how can a he quickly move from what’s now to what’s next?
Primarily retailers’ focus on efforts to build a competitive edge for the future by going interoperable and seamless across all channels.
Progression towards this path will be truly seamless set of systems, the business and IT will support continual adaptation, the digital experience will be supported by analytics and scalable IT, and the in-store experience will be integrated with digital channels.
Cloud applications for retail, scalability delivered as-a-service, makes this distant dream possible. Retailers’ can now meet time-pressed, on-the go and digitally connected consumers during their entire retail cycle of stepping into the store to the checkout. Currently, cloud applications are effective tools for retailers to build capabilities fast enough to hold the attention of consumers. Read More…
Achieving competitive advantage in Retail with Cloud
December 24, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Utilizing applications on the Cloud is the latest buzz across industries and has compelled retailers to evaluate the potential of the cloud to capitalize on the benefits that it offers.
Enterprise LARGE or SMALL are moving quickly to adopt cloud based applications & services that could enhance their competitive landscape.
Retailers have recognized the cloud’s ability to increase business speed & agility, lower costs, enable new means of growth, innovation, and collaboration as the drivers for its aggressive rate of adoption.
The infographic below shares some very interesting statistics that will help retailers extend their business value and advantage, including faster time to market, lower cost of operations and ability to focus on core business.
PT Putra Gemilang streamlines their Retail operations for increased profitability by adopting iVend Retail and SAP Business One
December 3, 2014 by Leave a Comment
COMPANY : PT Putra Gemilang Prima
Country: Indonesia
Industry : Building Material
Only a few modern retail stores in Indonesia selling building materials place their customer’s comfort and shopping convenience as top priority. Our customer Gemilang group were always focused on creating great buying experiences and hence engage with customers. Gemilang group were innovators to bring the concept of convenience retailing among hardware vendors, and industry known for rugged retailing.
Established in 1975 in Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan, Gemilang’s outlets always stand out among competition with their customers speaking positive about them. Gemilang’s objective has been to make shopping convenient for customers. Each of their outlet is conceptualized with availability and access to an ATM center, minimarket, coffee shop and food stall and a kids play ground, so that children could engage in play activities while their parent’s shop.
Challenges
Mr. Arya Iwanputra, owner of Putra Gemilang Prima, considers IT as the most crucial department in his enterprise. Gemilang group had aggressive expansion plans and wanted adequate inventory planning and resource optimization. To support their plans company needed a reliable and scalable IT system with automated business processes. Management at Gemilang wanted deeper strategic insights from their retail system for optimally managing inventory and purchase at their retail stores. However, Gemilang’s existing system was unable to deliver expected results to match with the company’s growth.
Solution
iVend Retail, iVend Loyalty with SAP Business One
Benefits :
- Reliable functionality and easy to use interface
- Integrated Data Management
- Faster decision making process
- On-time data and report availability
- Better understanding of customer buying preferences
- Efficient accounting & finance
- Improved analysis and control
“Our system was primitive and could not accommodate our growth, a simple process such as report generation would consume enormous manual effort and had to be reprocessed again and again to derive metrics”
Arya Iwanputra, Owner of Putra Gemilang Prima
CitiXsys November Newsletter 2014
December 3, 2014 by Leave a Comment
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Mobile POS Coming to Forefront
November 28, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Globally retail stores are beefing up their sales capabilities ditching the old-fashioned point of sale machines and having salespeople — and even shoppers themselves — ring up sales on smartphones and tablet computers.
Barneys New York, a luxury retailer, this year plans to use iPads or iPod Touch devices for credit and debit card purchases in seven of its nearly two dozen regular-price stores.
Mobile point-of-sale devices are no longer just a tool for specialty retailers or smaller merchants to accept card payments. Increasingly, large U.S. retailers are equipping associates with smartphones and tablets that let them accept customer payments from the sales floor.
Technology has consistently been a major driver in retail but mobile POS devices are transforming the retail industry in a
way that few technologies have done before. “Retailers which have eschewed cumbersome cash wraps in favor of a mobilized checkout are already reaping increased savings, sales and customer satisfaction,” said the report, written by Yankee Group analyst Jordan McKee.
Industry experts are of the opinion that year 2014 marked the transformation of Point of sale terminals as they became increasingly mobile and the trend would take Big Box retailers by storm in the coming year
The need of the hour is to look for ways to better understand customers and deliver the right products to the right channel at the right time at the right price. Customer’s reach to more product information along with a myriad of product choices has shifted power to the consumer while resulting in higher customer expectations.
Mobile POS technology helps retailers enhance their customer’s shopping experience, while reducing the costs of providing that enhanced experience. While operational efficiency remains important, retailers are leveraging mobile POS technology to close sales instantly, optimize demand side processes, attract and retain more customers and drive future growth.
To create marketplace advantages in the future, retailers already know their customers intimately, including their needs, wants, preferences, and values and are restructuring their business processes and in-store technologies to ensure customer expectations are fully satisfied.
Mobile POS has a positive impact on revenue as it doesn’t add complexity to the existing retail environment and considerably empowers the store associates.
The new POS technology that extends to mobile devices as applications, employee hand-held, new payment devices, numerous displays and customer facing systems can help fuel loyalty and sales technological com, making the job of a Store Associate more effective without adding technological complexity.
We always hear the old say that “People buy from people” and this is essentially true in context to the retail sector. If your forward workforce is happy and motivated and as a result the interaction with customers is a positive one. For any retail business, this positive experience really does go a long way to reinforcing a positive brand reputation.
Converging Retail digitally
November 28, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Technology innovations have been fast transforming the world around us and are leaving a definitive impact on the way customers shop for products and services. Retailers are also evolving to these changing market dynamics by redefining customer experience in retail space with multitude of personalized touch points.
Digital consumers do not differentiate between these trends. For consumers, these trends are just an extension of their 
experience with the world around them, be it interacting with a retailer, or elsewhere. It is now an accepted fact that future success of retail lies in the convergence of physical and digital channels enabled by digital transformation. This transformation will make it possible for companies to provide an integrated, meaningful and personalized experience to customers across all relevant and critical touch points – when shoppers make their choices.
Channel Integration or convergence is one of the primary challenges for all multichannel retailers in the quest for profitable retailing. When a customer makes contact with a retailer-whether it be online, via mobile application, via catalogue, or in store- it’s important that they are treated in the same way; and that the high level of service that a customer received face to- face is replicated via other channels. To provide that service, the retailer must have an integrated platform for retail, an efficient retail management solution that ensure the right product is in the right place at the right time, which is absolutely critical.
Only an enterprise class retail application can help a retailer address the expectations of a digital consumer. An in-depth understanding of consumer behavior in-store and online with their purchasing preferences has become essential. Modern retail applications represent the key to future retail business model that reflects channel convergence. Discussed below are a few recommendations that can help forward-looking retailers’ adopt this model with ease.
Improving the in-store experience
Physical stores need to offer experiences that consumers can’t have in the digital space. The existing boundaries between digital and physical need to fade by leveraging technologies like mobile. Digital passes, Becons and geotagging are new initiatives to take mobile social consumer with tide.
Access and Discovery
Retailer’s and brands need to creatively promote all channels and applications (marketing mailers, promotions etc.) to generate traffic. At the same time, location-based applications can help retailers find customers and target them with personalized promotions and offers.
Empower your workforce
Mobile POS puts real-time customer data into the hands of your store associates, which can lead to instant in-store conversion, lesser abandoned carts, increased basket size (via cross- and up selling) and improved customer experience and satisfaction in the store.
Real time analytics for actionable insights
Retail analytics is the ultimate performance-monitoring tool, which makes it possible to promote immediate, compelling offers to customers, regardless of channel. Which item is performing, which store is performing, what sells with what etc. a retailer can run and monitor promotions and schemes in real time, enabling a consumer to get a better value for their money – whether through digital or physical channels.
Invest in the last mile
The explosion of order and delivery channels has made order management and fulfillment more important and challenging than ever. A recent study found that nearly nine out of 10 retailers say they support fulfillment through more than one selling channel. In this environment, flexibility is essential. With leading retailers making headlines for their ship-from-store programs, a new bar is being set for inventory utilization in retail, but many retailers do not yet have the infrastructure in place to meet this challenge.
The siloed approach won’t work
The consumer is in the driver’s seat and a halfhearted approach to digital media would not suffice. This convergence of shopping behavior will help make 2015 the breakout year for the digital store, unlocking new experiences and value that can only be delivered in a physical location
Some companies have captured the true business benefits of a digital transformation. Most, however, are only beginning their journey to transform. Our experience in retail points towards Digital convergence as the most sought after trend in retailing for the year 2015, imparting retail businesses an operational advantage to monetary gains for retailer’s who plan to transform themselves for future
Go Online with an Integrated eCommerce Solution
October 30, 2014 by Leave a Comment
eCommerce portals are now a mainstream channel of sales for retail interactions offering new opportunities to augment revenue and get closer to customers. They act as important retail touch point to connect with business associates and customers’ to build a steady stream of revenue. In this issue of Retail insights we discuss the features that an Integrated eCommerce solution must have to suffice the demands of modern retail.
Traditional portal platforms come with a generic and loosely coupled integration with the retail ecosystem. A consulting engagement or a large development project is required to complete the integration. These and such projects often end up as a heap of functionality that is difficult to deploy and use.
On the other hand iVend eCommerce, an integral part of iVend Retail Management Suite reduces the need for a lengthy consulting engagement, allowing a retail enterprise to deliver results faster.
iVend eCommerce therefore significantly reduces the time to Market.
Download the Magazine to learn more about iVend eCommerce
CitiXsys October Newsletter 2014
October 24, 2014 by Leave a Comment
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Ease of Master Data Management in iVend eCommerce
October 24, 2014 by Leave a Comment
iVend eCommerce is the integrated eCommerce portal of iVend Retail Management Suite. Notwithstanding the business benefits of an integrated eCommerce portal, iVend eCommerce also extends a high level of convenience to the retailer – more from the view point of master data management. The fundamental and the most basic expectation from an integrated eCommerce portal is to not only have the transactions integrated, but also to have a common repository of the master data.
Master Data Management in the context of an eCommerce portal plays an important role in establishing a successful online business. One of the major aspects of master data management is the ability of the application suite to allow users a single application interface from where the entire master data can be managed. Specifically, we are referring to item master, their associated images, price lists, special price lists, gift cards, coupons, etc. In an integrated retail application like iVend Retail Management Suite, iVend Enterprise is the central repository of the entire master data. The configuration settings available in iVend Enterprise make it possible to either share the entire master data across the retail network or make it store or eCommerce specific.
Definition and management of images determine the aesthetics and usability of an eCommerce portal.
Since the customer does not have the option of physically feeling the products, the closest an online retailer can come is to show multiple different images and profiles of the product. Moreover a product can either be displayed on the home page or the entity page or on the product page or any other location on the eCommerce portal. The size of the image at all these locations is always different. Given the different locations (on the portal) and the image sizes, managing images can be a nearly impossible task.
iVend eCommerce resizes images automatically depending on the location (on the portal) where all the image is to be displayed. It is the same image that can be shown on the home page, entity page, product page, in the shopping cart, in the order confirmation page, etc. This feature significantly reduces the overhead of master data management for images.
Not only the images, iVend eCommerce being integrated to iVend Enterprise allows seamless integration of gift cards, coupons and loyalty cards between the two applications. Similarly price lists can be made specific to iVend eCommerce.
There are many more such features in iVend eCommerce that reduce the need to duplicate master data once it is entered in one of the integrated applications of iVend Retail Management Suite.
To know more about master data management in iVend eCommerce, please visit www.iVend.com or write to us at [email protected]
