Given often razor-thin margins, retailers must constantly find ways to revitalize relationships with customers and increase operational efficiency. Many improvements can be driven through IT solutions, and business leaders are relying on IT to help align the business with marketplace realities.
Flexible Web portal solutions can help retailers take advantage of existing and new technologies, including Web 2.0 tools, to support improved shopping experiences as well as solutions that drive productivity and efficiency in stores, between lines of business and within the supply chain. These solutions fit within the "Develop Smarter Merchandising and Supply Chains" and "Smarter Operations" imperatives of the Retail Industry Framework.
The assets found in IBM Retail Industry Toolbox can help retailers understand how solutions developed with IBM WebSphere Portal solutions can help deliver flexible, integrated environments that support personalized user experiences for customers, employees, and the extended value chain.
Thought Leadership:
Smarter Supply Chains - Vendor Management Portal
Strong supply chain management offers retailers a key competitive advantage. The Supply Chain area has seen many innovations and the competitive environment continues to demand new, innovative approaches. One core requirement is the need to continually optimize sourcing and distribution as new categories and products are introduced. Today`s on-boarding process for new vendors are inefficient, difficult and costly due to high administrative overhead, information required in the process residing in many different systems.
Vendor Management portals can help enable the rapidly-changing vendor on-boarding process to add new offerings and go to market faster, and make a retailer`s site, stores, and brands "the place to be" for vendors. Today`s smart retailers are leveraging supplier portals as a way to save cost and increase productivity and profitability. They have become collaborative platforms extending enterprise applications to benefit all parties in reduced cost, risk and cycle. IBM`s Vendor Management Portal for Retailers allows intelligent, pro-active collaboration between trading partners to provide secure, efficient collaboration via the web.
Smarter Operations - Store Operations Portals
In today`s global economy, retailers struggle to effectively and efficiently communicate with retail stores. IBM`s Store Operations Portal for Retailers helps manage large volumes of content and growing numbers of content developers and providers, as well as increasing productivity and simplifying content management processes. Employees and departments can easily customize their views of information and interact among themselves improving their overall effectiveness. It also provides to quickly on-board new employees, and streamline common HR processes to reduce costs and improve productivity. Collaborative content portals from IBM can help reduce costs and ensure that all locations have the right information at the right time.
Smarter Supply Chains - Store and Channel Integration Portal
In this global economy, retailers are feeling the pressure to optimize all processes across their network of franchises and dealers to be more effective. Providing the right information at the right time, in the right context, can be a key differentiator. IBM`s Store and Channel Integration Portal for Retailers provides an adaptive and dynamic infrastructure designed to grow with your business and help make your dealers/franchises more successful. It provides the tools to improve the speed and accuracy of communications between head office and the dealerships as well as facilitate increased collaboration with business partners.
Smarter Operations - Retail Store & Human Capital Management Portal
Retailers often struggle with a dynamically changing workforce. The Retail Store & Human Capital Management Portal for Retailers helps manage this process and make the transitions smoother. By providing stores with automated systems to facilitate new employee on-boarding, new employee checklists, access to training, and HR activities via the portal, new-hires will be brought up to speed quickly and efficiently, and reduce the need for training. The user-friendly, portal-based interface helps existing employees access common HR applications themselves, thereby freeing up HR resources to focus on other, more strategic initiatives.
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Slumberland
"IBM's portal and Web Content Management software have helped Slumberland survive and thrive in a challenging economy"
Jamie Page, Director of Information Services, Slumberland