Blog Post - Why Is Integrated Retail Planning the Future of Retail Tech?

The right retail technology adopts an integrated approach to offer digital transformation for organizations recovering from the ongoing pandemic

Retail technology has helped organizations survive the ups and downs of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the industry and market. Looking ahead, however, as businesses try to comprehend the next steps in an already hyper-competitive market, does the future of retail tech offer enough to improve order management, inventory control, optimization across the supply chain, or enhancement in customer experience?

The right retail technology adopts an all-in-one method where data from multiple silos is integrated into a single platform to offer transformation across planning, modeling, and predictive analytics. This integrated approach to retail planning is the future of retail tech because it:

• Offers resilience through digital transformation and maturity
• Reduces the issues associated with data silos to power predictive modeling & planning in decision-making
• Achieves a 360-degree view of the customer, giving the organization more insight into what drives their customer-base

Resilience through digital transformation

If nothing else, the pandemic’s significant effect on the retail market highlights how important organizational agility is. Businesses must adapt to changes quickly to survive.

An integrated retail planning solution takes all the data, both internal and external, to inform the decision-making processes in place. This data comes from all critical organizational areas — finance, strategy, operations, and so on — to build predictive models based on analytics from those functional areas’ data.

In turn, this adds new levels of agility to the retailer and builds resilience against market fluctuations.

Predictive modeling & planning

In this context, the term integrated looks towards breaking down retail data silos — marketing, finance, HR, merchandising, supply chain, and operations. These departments must all work together in a coordinated fashion from one master plan and not from a collection of spreadsheets.

Take merchandise assortment reviews as an example. A series of spreadsheets will mean filtering to understand essential data such as inventory, buying plan, and fulfillment rates to adjust replenishment. This is an uphill task shortened through an automated system that allows different scenario modeling and easily made adjustments to operations, supply chain, and financials.

A 360-degree view of the customer

Since an integrated retail planning solution considers all the data in an organization, both internal and external, to create business models and predictive scenarios, retailers essentially have a complete view of their lifetime customer value.

Understanding customers is an essential aspect of retail. Organizations can model customer behavior more accurately and make sensible predictions about how a customer base will react to new experiences while keeping an eye on the operational processes and financial costs.

Questions can be simulated and predicted according to models that an integrated retail planning solution delivers, connecting the dots between customer experience and business operations. Retailers can determine if new experiences or innovations are worth pursuing based on financial performance.

The future of retail tech

It’s clear why integrated retail planning is the future of retail tech. After a year of developing the agility to utilize technology quickly, retailers need resilience in 2021 to grow revenue and profitability predictably. Whether deploying same-day delivery services, modeling new supply chain forecasts, or enabling digital customer experiences in-store, retailers can become resilient with integrated retail planning technology.

Learn more about why a holistic digital transformation is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity for survival in a world where retailers always need to be prepared for change. Register to this live webinar now.