Smart Retail | Smart Ostrich

Smart Retail & Industry 4.0 – Pushing Sales into the Future

Not many have heard of industry 4.0 and smart retail yet but they soon will.

We all learned about the industrial revolution in History class. From assembly lines to the changing role of labor and mechanization, there is a collective mental image in our heads of a past century in flux.

That, however, is not where the story comes to an end. What with the burgeoning trends of mass production, electricity, automation, and computing technology, the industry as a whole has now experienced several notable revolutions – cue industry 4.0 and smart retail.

In the past few years, we have again entered a new phase of industrialization, akin to a revolution. Known as ‘industry 4.0’, this collective industrial improvement involves the ‘internet of things’, cyber-physical systems, and cloud/cognitive computing.

In simplified terms, industry 4.0 refers to how our devices communicate with one another and are able to learn over time, thereby heightening efficiency and decentralization. In practice, these new advances are most clearly manifested in a collective series of processes that have become known as smart retail.

What Is Smart Retail?

Smart retail refers to the hybridization between traditional shopping methods and modern ‘smart’ technologies. Through the internet-of-things, data is accumulated by way of communication between implanted devices and computers. As a result, consumers may enjoy a more personalized, faster, and smarter experience. This can manifest as individualized coupons and smartly curated inventories.

In practice, smart retail’s greatest asset is its involvement with artificial intelligence (AI). Just because a process includes automation doesn’t mean that it has the capability to make complex decisions, particularly ones that may have an effect on a business and its processes, both radical or otherwise.

With AI included in the processes, those decision-making powers have now become possible. In this case, they’ll also experience constant self-correction and improvement. It may sound a bit like The Avenger’s Ultron, but in actuality, smart retail and industry 4.0’s applications are not to be feared. Instead, their features, benefits, and overall impact should entice everyone to join the revolution!

What Are Smart Retail’s Features?

The implementation of smart retail-related processes has completely altered the landscape of the sales industry. In fact, many traditional retailers and industry leaders have seen industry 4.0, smart retail and their fundamental features to be the solution to several issues endemic to their line of business. Decentralization, optimization, and transparency, for example, all play necessary roles in said solution.

Decentralization

Decentralization, in any setting, heavily depends on reliability across the board, so as to have confidence that overall decision-making and efficiency is maintained without managerial oversight. The same holds true for smart retail, in that it requires little manual interference and is able to optimize and adjust its processes through sheer automation.

Transparency

In the case of smart retail, transparency refers to the presence of relevant data across the supply chain. With information readily obtainable across all levels, both human management and automated systems will be able to take note of trends, make more accurate choices, or detect errors before they are able to arise.

Optimization

Smart retail, with proper optimization, takes advantage of its decentralized and transparent nature to become more versatile and dynamic. Therein, not only will smart retailers be able to adapt without trouble, but it will also be able to take action against abnormalities before they become a risk to the greater retail infrastructure.

What Are Smart Retail’s Benefits?

By their very nature, smart retail results in an optimized, decentralized, and transparent sales process for both the retailer itself and the greater supply chain. However, many companies focus on tangible benefits, beyond the broad features. To that end, the benefits of smart retail include increased efficiency, quality, and output sustainability.

Efficiency

Self-adaptation and its effect on efficiency is smart retail’s greatest strength. When fully operational, efficient smart retail will have constant access to an ever-changing stream of data. Therein, smart retail will analyze and self-correct in order to make the sales and adaptation process, as well as its output, as efficient as possible.

Quality

Considering smart retail’s ability to detect and resolve potential issues before they have a chance to become properly troublesome, its end-result never has a chance to suffer. Therefore, the quality of any given smart retailer’s output will trend higher than any of those produced by non-smart means, which sometimes produce inadequate results.

Sustainable Output

Within traditional retail and sales spaces, disruptions have been known to happen on occasion, whether it be due to labour, environmental, and accidental factors. The adaptability and self-correction processes that come with smart retail eliminates the possibility for human error. Its automation, therefore, can result in increased safety and ensured output sustainability.

What Is Smart Retail’s Impact?

Smart Retail does not simply exist on its own. While its features and benefits have indeed altered the sales and marketing processes of stores everywhere, its impact goes much further beyond. What effect does this newest industrial revolution have on the workforce, on the supply chain, and on security? Read onward to find out!

Workforce Skill Alteration

The processes of an industry cannot undergo such a revolution without impacting the average worker in some way. Just as in the previous industrial revolutions, the role of the human workforce has changed. Broadly speaking, workers will shift away from physical labor and towards technological support, thereby necessitating a technical skillset.

Supply Chain Adaptation

Across the supply chain, from warehouse management to quality control and sales, the rise of smart retail has forced adaptation across the board. Since smart retail’s automation and self-correction processes are working at all times, the rest of the supply chain needs to be able to maintain the same degree of flexibility.

IT Security

In our digital era, information has become accessible like never before, but at the cost of security. Data protection has rapidly become a fully-fledged industry as many entities seek information protection. Smart retail, inherently, is not free from this issue but has inspired many corporations to make finding a solution a priority.

The Future of Retail: How IoT Will Power Smart Stores

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of today’s hottest technologies. It’s completely transforming our private and professional lives, from basic daily household chores to our security and wealth, with interconnected digital devices. It’s expected that the market will grow from 15 billion devices in 2015 to over 75 billion in 2025, according to IHS. Consequently, we are all moving towards technology solutions that can improve the quality of our lives.

IoT solutions in retail

One reason why retailers prefer IoT over more traditional solutions is that it significantly improves security. We’re in the middle of the digital transformation. Everything is becoming digitized, from how we pay, search for products, and shop, to the ways we provide feedback, build relationships with brands, or find new sources for our purchases.

Today’s consumers are more informed, and they want their purchases to be entire experiences. The IoT is enabling retail stores to evolve into smart stores, which obtain data about customers’ tastes, needs, and habits in real time. This enables retailers to predict customers’ behaviour and provide them with the products or services they want and need.

Smart stores: Enhancing the customer journey

With all of this data, stores can offer a level of personalization we’ve never seen before. Knowing the profile of the person in your store – understanding their needs and preferences – is the key to successful retail. Imagine you’re a customer looking for watches, specifically a Rolex Sea Dweller, and the salesperson knows what you are looking for based on the information they have about you. Having a salesperson who knows your taste will speed the purchase process and make it more enjoyable.

Smart stores are using this concept to understand what their customers need by interacting with them to build meaningful relationships and optimize their experiences. A store is no longer just a physical place to purchase what you need; a smart store revolves around social interaction.

Smart stores can also leverage micro-location, which uses in-store sensors to identify long-time customers, access their shopping trends through the cloud, and send them a coupon for a relevant product while they are still in the store. This a very powerful way to engage your customers and enhance their shopping experiences. These marketing strategies can also improve your target audience’s perception of your brand as one that focuses on what is important to them.

Other technologies that smart stores can use include heat mapping, shelf sensors, and predictive maintenance equipment. Heat mapping uses basic visual sensors to track customers’ habits, such as popular store areas, products, and times for shopping. Shelf sensors track inventory levels on the shelves and alert store teams when they need to restock to ensure a favorable customer experience. Predictive maintenance works on the same principle to fix equipment before problems occur to optimize the maintenance team’s work and save money.

The Internet of Things is the right solution to handle this tremendous shift in customer behavior. Today’s customers don’t want to passively spend their money. They want information, personalization, socialization, and more; they want experiences. Concepts like smart stores make it easier for retailers to provide what today’s customers want.

Smart Retail evolving through IOT & 4ir

Organisations have a significant opportunity to leverage new technology to save on the bottom line. Whether it’s increasing efficiency, reducing waste or maximising yield. Technology facilitates that by simplifying the route to intelligent assets, or as I would describe to my relatives – giving machines and buildings a heartbeat.

The key to the retail industry evolving through technology is advancing connectivity and increasing visibility. By that I mean visibility of the issues that need to be solved. While there has been a lot of coverage about Amazon Go stores and using IoT for a cashless experience, there are many other problems that retailers need to solve that can provide an enhanced customer experience.

Such problems include increasing business rates & maintenance costs but also waste. These are the crucial behind the scenes operations of the pioneering retail experience, but also are now being used to turn waste into new products. These are just a couple of factors that will see 50% of large global companies use the internet of things in supply chain operations by 2023. We’re now at the point where the same attention and KPIs apply to supply as much demand.

Connectivity

Without connectivity in the first instance, visibility of how bad a problem with a core business asset is (or could be) is difficult for retail businesses to size up. There is no calculated opportunity cost of not fixing that issue until it is highlighted.

Some examples of this are:

Greater visibility of supply chain and unnecessary costs
Barriers to purchase, the position of a product in store
Cost of sales at a store level
Energy usage across estate be that depots, logistics, in store – HVAC, sub meters and process automation controllers.
Lighting usage vs footfall – peak trading 100%

The challenge with connectivity is the paralysing fear that IoT can’t simply be ‘setup’. Surely, it’s too complicated? We don’t have the adequate infrastructure. The cost of implementation is too high. We have concerns over security. What about data privacy? We have legacy systems that won’t be able to be connected. We’ve heard all of these and more

Visibility

Once connected, stakeholders within an organisation can contextualise the problems in to the everyday. Hark plays in a world where IoT connectivity not only connects hardware and software, but also connects silo’d IT and Property departments and brings together teams, perhaps that’s the true spirit of digital transformation – connecting experiences across a business.

If a recycling baler is faulty it may use more energy, that’s a problem for both a warehouse manager but also an energy manager. If a store manager is incentivised to reduce energy, store lights may be less bright which may affect footfall. If lights are left on repeatedly in one store that may show up in your finance reports as a less profitable store.

Intelligence

The final piece of the puzzle is adding an intelligence layer that learns and understands the context of assets within the business in order to make predictions and detect anomalies. This type of technology is crucial in order to allow businesses to quickly identify increases in energy, assess equipment health and ultimately reduce costs.

Utilising the advances in Machine Learning technologies, businesses have access to an unprecedented toolset that can turn the data generated by assets into information that can streamline operations.

What is paramount is having good quality data feeds. Bad data = Bad information = Bad results.

Whether “someone has left the industrial grade toaster on” or a leaking pipe that could halt production, an asset has a potential fault brewing, each of these types of problem, if caught earlier, can ultimately reduce waste. Wasted time, wasted energy, wasted cost.

What Digital Transformation Actually Means For Retail

Digital transformation. At its highest level, it means using digital technologies to create game-changing business innovations that disrupt existing industries or create whole new ones. That’s a pretty simple definition, but it quickly gets very difficult to drive that down to specifics. People point to Spotify or Uber, where technology upended a market. With Spotify (digital streaming), physical media for delivering music became irrelevant. With Uber, technology can connect people who need rides with people who have cars with some ride capacity. In both cases, it changed the economics of the impacted industry in radical ways.

Retail still has one thing about it that simply cannot change: retail, in the end, involves transferring possession of physical goods to a consumer. You can’t (yet) digitize a sweater. I certainly haven’t found anyone who can beam some cupcakes to my kitchen counter when my daughter tells me at 7 am that she needs them for school that day.

This one little thing – the transfer of real, physical goods to a consumer – is both the biggest difference retail faces when taking on digital transformation, and also the biggest inhibitor that locks retailers into thinking that digital transformation isn’t going to impact them like other industries.

Unfortunately, it will impact them just as much as digital music decimated the music store. When you look at how consumers acquire products, pretty much every part of the shopper journey is being digitized, except for that last physical transfer of goods. Probably the last bastion of the physical is fit for apparel, or “touch and feel” for non-apparel items. And even fit is rapidly being digitized – it will come. When stores are designed to deliver the end-to-end shopping experience, where the retailer held the most product information within the store itself, and now consumers no longer need that experience, then it’s not surprising that store traffic is down and store sales are taking a hit.

But it’s more than that – those issues are surface level issues of a deeper problem, which is the whole retail model to begin with. Retail has always been product-centric. Everything about retail was about transferring product from a supplier or factory to a consumer. To be successful in that model, retailers needed to be very good at buying low, selling high, and optimizing everything in between.

The profit and differentiation in every one of those steps is getting picked off by digital transformation. Buying low is challenging, especially when you’re buying national brands. Unless you’ve got the volume of Walmart, you’re never going to get a lower price than your competitors. And designing your own products to sell works for a little while, until the even cheaper knock-offs start showing up in the market.

Selling high has been equally eroded. Retailers haven’t been able to succeed selling high since 2007, before the Great Recession. Retailers can try to support a higher price with service, but consumer price sensitivity, coupled with short-term profit-seeking has cut retailers’ ability to provide excellent service deep into the bone. Most retailers’ definition of service these days has become cheapened to the point of uselessness to the consumer – having a clean store, or a “short line” to ring up a purchase has become the standard of good service, which is actually more like “barely adequate service.” Stores have historically been designed around trapping consumers inside so that they spend more, instead of offering convenience as the customer defines it – foundationally, they are not designed for customer service, in that context.

And when it comes to optimizing everything in between – you simply can’t do that in a world dominated by Amazon. People write about how Amazon’s pursuit of randomness in the warehouse upends a lot of traditional inventory velocity and positioning theory, but it doesn’t address the efficiency of the order itself. And Amazon is famous for its order inefficiency – the internet is full of images of stupidly inefficient packaging in boxes shipped to consumers. I just last week received a box the size of a small dresser which held a perfectly shippable box of 27 boxes of tissues. It was sent 2-Day, included in the cost of my Prime membership.

When you face a competitor who gets money from the market for free, and can subsidize its retail activities with profits from other businesses, you will never win by optimizing your processes. You can never optimize enough to beat Amazon, at least not until the market demands that Amazon play on a level playing field. At this rate, you’ll be out of business by then.

Digital Transformation For Real

So what does digital transformation mean in retail? It’s about moving from this obsolete product-centric model to one that is customer-centric. Again, that’s easy to say, but what does it mean for retail specifically?

Instead of buy low, sell high, and optimize everything in between (a supply chain view), retailers need to focus on the digital value chain – one focused on collecting data (about products, customers, and locations), turning that data into insights, and then turning those insights into action.

Ironically, this is actually Amazon’s game. Amazon Go is but one example of the concept in play – a store wired up with cameras and sensors that track a shopper’s every move. The experiment that is Amazon Go is not about the ROI of a cashier-less store. Considering how much effort had to go into training the AI involved to recognize specific shopper behaviours (which delayed opening the store to the public by several months), I seriously doubt the labour savings of no cashiers in store was ever the driving value from the investment.

But, oh, the data gathered. Every shopper move. Every product picked up and then dropped in a bag. Every label read and product replaced on the shelf. Every hesitation, head nod… If that sounds creepy, sure it is. But it is also an enormous amount of data about the blackest box in retail today: the store. One thing I’ve learned in my own travels is that innovative retailers do not define ROI in terms of optimizing processes. Instead, they look for projects that create opportunities to gather data – all kinds of data, including the expected and the unexpected.

The value of innovation projects comes from how quickly that data can be turned into insights, and how quickly those insights can be turned into actions. It’s those actions that ultimately drive the return on investment, by creating new services for customers, new kinds of engagement, or capitalizing on insights into what customers want by more closely meeting their needs.

This is the definition of digital transformation in retail – what it takes to move from a buy low/sell high model that is product-centric, to an insight-driven model that is customer-centric.

Retailers fail at making this transition in three ways.

One, they try to protect their existing organizational structure from radical change. These are the people who veneer their awful processes, inflexible technology, and competing/contradictory incentives that have different parts of the business working at cross-purposes. They’re able to make some progress once, and one time only, because they didn’t put in the flexible business processes that let them continue to evolve over time.

Two, they don’t develop an insight-driven culture. No unified data strategy. No emphasis on turning data into insights. They continue to rely on corporate myths about what customers really want, about what works (which is based on insights developed twenty years ago), and no single version of the truth to go to in order to fight back against those corporate myths. Fiefdoms prevent assembling one version of the truth across the company. And are enabled by an ROI process that undervalues the contribution of learning something new about customers or creating a new way to engage with customers because no one can speak to how it will explicitly move the needle for the business, either on the revenue side or the cost side. Contrast that with Amazon, which is more willing to invest in new processes or technologies to see what they can learn – to collect the data, and then look for ROI, rather than the other way around. It’s the difference between investing in order to learn where the value is, vs. never investing because the value cannot be predicted in the first place. How will you ever learn what you don’t already know?

Three, they don’t value technology as an enabler. Different departments run off and buy their own solutions, because the IT department is so bogged down they face a two-year backlog and very little investment into innovation. This perpetuates the retailer’s challenge in building an insight-driven organization, because these new processes are so detached from the business they can’t connect back into one view of the data. Disconnected processes lead to a fractured view of data, no insights, and no flexible business processes to adapt to take advantage of the next round of insights gained.

Bottom Line

Digital transformation is for real. Retail as a business can no longer be just about products. It has to be about customers. By extension, that means retailers no longer are going to make money by optimizing their product-driven processes. Walmart through its relentless focus on efficiency has sucked all the profit out of product processes, and Amazon’s low prices (subsidized by its web services business) has undermined any other profit that was left.

If retailers are going to transform themselves from product-centric to customer-centric, they must succeed in moving from efficiency to flexibility, from optimization to inspiration. The money to be made will come from the volume of customer insights a company can generate and how quickly they can put those insights into play, not from how fast they can move product. And most importantly, retail can’t get there by protecting existing organizations, processes, or even technology investments. That is the retail apocalypse that we’re seeing in the market, not some “death of retail.” It’s the difference between retailers who understand that the change they need to make is far more than hiring a VP of Omni channel or a Chief Customer Officer vs. those that hire one of those titles and call it a day.

Radical change – digital transformation – is not coming. It’s here.

IoT and Big Data Help with Personalization

With the increasing number of connected devices, there is a completely unprecedented amount of data generated each day. Thankfully, advances in AI and machine learning are making analyses of this data not only possible but accessible to smaller retailers.

Detailed data analysis helps retailers better understand the ebbs and flows of their own businesses to optimize staffing, inventory management and even lower the risk of experimenting with new product lines. Connected devices can even help retailers understand how consumers are using their products, helping them to better market them to other interested shoppers.

Brick-and-mortar stores can make use of this by offering location-based push notifications whenever their targeted or returning customers are nearby (if they opted in to receive them, of course).

Cloud Computing Keeps Data Safe

Cloud computing offers numerous benefits to retailers, such as having a better overview of all operations and better insights into business performance, and all of that for a fraction of the price of other server-based solutions. Not only is it cost effective, it’s also scalable and flexible, and cloud-based security services can be used to bring security up to date.

Since the advent of credit cards, consumers have been vulnerable to having their information stolen. Laws that once favoured credit issuers now protect consumers, making it the responsibility of every retailer out there to protect consumer information. No matter how small or large your retail brand is, protecting your customers’ data is a must.

Additive Manufacturing Eliminates Waste

Additive manufacturing is sometimes referred to as 3D printing, but it is so much more than that. In fact, 3D printing and rapid prototyping are merely subsets of additive manufacturing. The difference between additive manufacturing and traditional manufacturing is the milling process. In traditional manufacturing, an object is initially manufactured that is larger than the end product and then milled down into its final shape or form. Needless to say, this results in a lot of waste.

Additive manufacturing adds on materials to a base, which results in almost no waste in materials to achieve the final form. Not only does additive manufacturing cut costs by eliminating waste, but the computer-generated design also eliminates most of the trial and error necessary to perfect the first generation offering. Any costs that are saved in the initial manufacturing process also cuts down on costs to retailers, which in turn cuts down on costs to consumers. Additive manufacturing makes it easier than ever for retailers to offer limited editions, smaller seasonal batches or even personalized or exclusive branded items at a reasonable cost.

VR and AR Improve the Shopping Experience

While Tesla dealerships have long been a shopping mall staple thanks to their smaller offerings and inventory compared to traditional car dealers, Audi may soon make the car buying process an entirely VR experience. Other more traditional retailers may not be far behind. Clothing stores in particular struggle with the challenges of keeping a wide enough selection of clothing in stock to meet the needs of all the many different body types of their shoppers.

This generally leads to oceans of racks, which takes up thousands of square feet of expensive retail space. In addition, trying on multiple items of clothing is a time-consuming experience for shoppers, not to mention frequently damaging to the merchandise. Soon, clothing stores may consist of nothing but seating areas with virtual reality (VR) goggles that shoppers can load their avatars into to try on clothing virtually. When they find something they like, an assistant (or even a robot) can bring it out for them from a back storage room.

Retail businesses are already seeing some initial promise of all that Industry 4.0 has to offer. In truth, however, what is currently available to even large chains is merely the tip of the iceberg. Contrary to many long-held fears about technology, human jobs are not in jeopardy. Technology does not take away jobs, it merely takes on tasks that humans generally find distasteful anyway, allowing them to focus on more complicated tasks like problem-solving and innovating. As smart as artificial intelligence may be, it can only do what it is programmed to do. It takes human intelligence to make leaps artificial intelligence never will.

Smart Retailing: a Way to Make Your Business Profitable

Smart Retailing is something that the Retailers in today’s world are concerned about. Smart Retailing deals with using the technologies and various innovations for the retailing purpose. One of the greatest innovations in today’s generation is the Smartphone. It helps the people to avail a great range of opportunity. It also has a large impact on the retailing process. Showrooming through the help of Smartphone is the latest trend among the customers. The customers can use their smart phones for shopping when they are still inside the stores.

Unlike the Online Retailing where the profit of the retailers is minimum smart retailing can bring a profitable outcome for the retailers.

How to Start the Smart Retailing Procedure?

Starting the procedure of smart retailing is also not so easy. It must be done by planning strategically to get the maximum profit out of this process. Retail Analytics play an important role in managing the various services of the retailers.

There must be a mobile app to start the purchasing process. This app launching must also be done by planning accordingly. The app helps the customers to locate the shop, locate the products, see the latest discounts and offers and moreover these apps also help the customers to give the answers to their various shopping related quires. This in turn also enhances the buying attitude among various customers.

Telephoning all the motivated customers should be another approach by the retailers to make the smart retailing procedure fruitful. Communicating with the customers from time to time is also a part of the smart retailing procedures. It not only helps the retailers to hold back or retain the customers but it also creates a level of satisfaction among the customers. The retailer must keep in mind that connecting is not the same thing as connection. They must plan for various strategies that must help in sustaining the connection with their customers.

How can the Customers get the maximum benefit from Smart Retailing?

Although the smart mode of retailing with its facilities of online shopping and mobile apps have provided the customers with a wide range of offerings, but the customers seems to be in a great mess. The customers are having problem while taking the purchasing decision and also in turn are losing the confidence. Thus the retailers must launch mobile app, communicate with the customers, and answer to their quires to make the smart retailing process beneficial.

Optimizing the store design to increase the sale as being believed by many US’s retailers is also another key to get the benefit from the smart retailing. According to many retail scenario of U.S they must focus on enhancing the organizational thinking to get a better result. They also focuses on the idea of improving the process of tracking the customer’s behaviour.

Changing Trends in Retailing:

There is rarely in distinction between the online and offline shopping. The customers in today’s world have also changed. Today most of the customers do a minimum research before purchasing something. So the retailers need to be smart enough to come up with the opinions that increase the urge among the customers to buy the product.
The smart retailers must have certain devices that are updated with information about their customers. This helps the retailers to know the customers behaviour and so they also help the customers by giving various advice regarding their purchase related quires.
Customers with the help of the Smartphone can now locate the shop, product and offers.

In Store Retail Analytics: Its Potential and Impact on Managing the Customer’s Behaviour

The world of Retail is changing at a fast pace. The retailers today are experimenting with lot of things to attract new customers as well as to retain the old ones. Thus retail analytics plays an important role among the Retailers to succeed in their business. Customers are a most essential part of business. Both for online and brick and mortar stores customers are an integral part of the business.

Scenario of In-Store Retailing:

The online Stores are experimenting with their styles, designs, placement of their products to attract the customers and so that their products catch the eyes of the people.

Although the brick and mortar stores are dominant among most of the customers but these stores lack behind due to improper technologies to conduct and judge their customers behavior. However, now most of the physical pay stresses to know their customers behavior. The retailers of these stores now have a close eye on the buying habits of the customers, movement of the customers inside the shop. In-store retailing is emerging at a fast pace in today’s retail shop. The retail shops now have security cameras inside the shops to keep a watch on their customers. The use of multiple cameras can track the behaviour of the individual customers as they roam about in the shop.

Benefits of knowing the Customer’s Behaviour:

In-store Retail Analytics also help the Retailers by providing data about the Customer’s Behaviour outside the shop. They provide data about where the customers are going, where the customers roam about, whether they are shopping alone or with friends. These data help the retailers to plan accordingly and project their products in front of their customers to get most of the output out of it.

On the other hand the brick and mortar stores those are lacking behind these sophisticated technologies also conduct these surveys on assessing the customers’ behaviour. They instead of using all these technologies they walk around the shop to look at the customers to assess their behaviour whether their plans and programs are working well on their customers.

Trends of In-Store Retailing:

The data collected from in-store retail analytics processes help the retailers by providing data of POS (point of Sale) as well as data related to the cash register of the store.

Another part of in-store retailing involves displaying the products and offers in a right manner so that it can attract and catch the eyes of the customers. Placing the products in front of the window or the glass door can catch the eyes of the passers-by also.

Customer traffic information plays an important role among the retailers. The data revealing the number of customers regularly entering the shop is very much an integral part of a good retailing. The data obtained from in-store retail analytics process also helps the retailers to know whether the promotions and the offers they designed for their customers are working well or not.

On the Retailers point of view in-Store Retail Analytics is a process of anticipating and understanding the customer’s needs and wants in a better way. Improving the staffing, identifying new offerings and planning valuable promotions for the customers are all a part of the in-store retailing process.

Problems faced by the Retailers:

The mistake that is common among the retailers is that they are unable to bridge the gap between their online stores and the brick and mortar stores. This is a mistake being common among the big multinationals companies also. In-store analytics can help the companies or the retailers regarding this matter.

Factors Determining the in-Store Analytics Process:

Technologies being used by the surrounding market or finding how mature the technology is.
Who are the competitors in the market?
Who is the priority or the top concerns among the retailers and what are the technologies being used by them?
Understanding what is in- store Retail Analytics:
Finding the meaning of in-store retail analytics is very important. In-store retail analytics also deals with various things.
The first thing that comes when we are talking about retail analytics is that finding out the people data or tracking the people data. This is an important step in managing the in-store retail analytics This process of tracking people data involves finding out the data or keeping a track on how many people are entering the shop every day, how many people are buying the products among these people. Thus maintaining the traffic data is very much needed for in-store retail analytics.
The retailers in the in-store retail also need to keep a track on what is the consumer’s behaviour. That means what are the promotional strategies that are attracting more customers, what are the products that are more common among the customers.
Wi-Fi store, mobile payment, queue management practices also plays an important role in the in-store retail analytics techniques.
Keeping a close eye to the inside scenario of the retail stores also play an important role in the in-store retail analytics process.
There is also a risk in in-store retail analytics process if it is not being done by the knowledgeable person. The result of in-sight retail analytics can affect the retail business badly if it is not done properly. The in-store retail analytics must be such that it brings a profit for the business.

Future Trends of the in-Store Retail Analytics:

In the recent years more and more retailers’ are opting for getting a multi-channel perspective of the consumer’s behaviour. The retailers in their in-store retail analytics procedure is focusing mainly on more and more interaction with their customers by the help of mobile, e-commerce or through the social networks. This will help to fill the wide gap between their online mode of retailing with that of their bricks and mortar store.

Disruptive technologies

In answering this question, let’s first unpack the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). It is an era that has seen the emergence of disruptive technologies such as robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. These new technologies have given rise to new jobs, altered processes and operations, and new consumer lifestyles.

As a result, businesses have had to adapt their strategies to keep up with such technological advances. Retailers have been particularly impacted by 4IR; and evidence is rife of how they have embraced the emerging technologies of the 4IR.

In developed nations, 4IR technologies are seen in retail in the following ways:

Virtual change-rooms: Consumers can enter a change-room and use the interactive mirror to reflect an outfit they want to try on. The mirror can be voice-activated: the consumer tells the mirror what they would like to try on – for example, skirts. The mirror would then provide the customer with all the skirt options available in-store.
In-store robots: Robots are used in-store to replace human staff. They guide and direct consumers, fulfil logistics-related tasks, improve overall operational efficiency, and enhance the customer experience.
Internet of Things (IoT): Integrating channels use customer data and technology to optimise the shopping experience for consumers. The US company, Amazon, created Amazon Go, which are physical Amazon stores that customers can visit. In them, shoppers can pick and choose products as they like, load them into their baskets, and simply walk out of the store. The products are electronically tagged, and are automatically scanned by a device as the consumer leaves. The purchased products are then charged to the consumer’s online Amazon account.

Such technologies are great ideas for developed economies, which have technologically advanced consumers and easy access to such technologies. However, to return to the South African debate: as an emerging market, we have to ask whether these exciting technologies will add value and be adopted by the large retail consumer base that falls into the low-income bracket?

Smart Retail: Untapped market for 4IR – Big data

In today’s digital world, data is currency. Data is collected everywhere whether you are signing up for a new social network or looking to adopt a pet. Similarly, data is collected at every stage of a supply chain and in every department of the retail industry. With big data in retail, the accumulated data can be used for analysis and for building effective strategies.

Data helps retailers understand their consumers and the demographics they belong to. Such data-based insights offer an informative approach for recognizing consumer demands by identifying which products and services have a high demand and which products are not doing well in the market. By analyzing market sales and performance for their products, retailers can make informed investment decisions. As an additional benefit, consumer data helps in determining the price that consumers find suitable for a product. Big data analytics enables businesses to explore the changing industry trends and niche consumer demands. Retail store giant, Target, created a pregnancy prediction model with the help of their baby-shower registry, purchase patterns, customer support queries, credit card use, survey responses, website use, and personal data. The model distributed baby product promotions to specific customers in a timely manner based on their stages of pregnancy. Hence, gathering consumer data creates a consumer-centric business atmosphere that caters to individual consumer needs.

Industrial IoT

Industrial IoT is one of the major contributors to the development of retail 4.0. IoT is consistently innovating the retail industry. IoT sensors help in creating an interactive environment across the board. The retail industry has realized the potential of IoT, which explains why 70% of retail decision makers globally want to adopt IoT for delivering better consumer experiences.

With IoT sensors, field devices can interact with each other and provide real-time updates to the concerned parties. IoT sensors can be installed to monitor expensive machines and equipment used for inventory management, production, and transportation purposes. IoT applications enable predictive maintenance of equipment, saving expenses incurred on equipment failure. IoT is giving rise to ‘smart’ retail stores that are connected with RFID tags. RFID tags help in the real-time management of stores. Similarly, IoT sensors can be used to track inventory levels of stores and warehouses. With such sensors, retailers will be notified if their inventory is running out of products and restock when required. At checkouts, consumers can scan IoT-powered tags and pay via mobile apps. Furthermore, retail stores can deploy beacons to alert customers about promotions and discounts when they are near certain products. Retail stores can also install smart shelves that scan RFID tags of products and measure their weight to monitor the availability of products on the shelves. When the shelves are empty, smart shelves alert the store owners. Such efforts can also enable theft prevention in the store.

Cloud computing

A transparent business approach is one of the top priorities of retail 4.0. Cloud computing allows sharing crucial data and documents across various channels whenever required. Due to its online nature, cloud computing proves to be more secure compared to the traditional methods. Moreover, cloud computing helps in horizontal and vertical system integration by providing a transparent medium for tracking the exact status of consignments, stock-outs, high inventories and the digital documents received from suppliers, logistics providers, brokers, and carriers. Developers are constantly improving cloud computing to make the technology faster and more secure than ever. Therefore, cloud computing and retail 4.0 are together promoting data-driven business practices.

Additive manufacturing

Modern technologies have developed new and innovative production techniques to ensure efficient and cost-effective manufacturing processes. Additive manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing are widely used to produce prototypes. But, in the era of retail 4.0, additive manufacturing is revolutionizing the supply chains by reducing material input and costs. With additive manufacturing, production processes will be simplified to enable large-scale production of products. Also, simpler machine-powered production processes will reduce the labour requirement.

With further developments in the technology, the production of new products that meet the changing customer demands will be quicker. Furthermore, additive manufacturing can also be used as a backup to traditional manufacturing techniques in the event of equipment failures.

Augmented Reality

Although augmented reality is still a relatively fresh technology, industrialists are investing in the research and development of its innovative use cases. Currently, augmented reality is used for numerous functions like selecting warehouse parts and sending repair instructions with mobile apps.

Online retailers are already providing mobile apps that help consumers “try out” clothes or virtually place furniture to check if it fits with their interior design. Several consumers are also using IBM app and Google Lens to scan products for information.

Roadmap for Adapting To Retail 4.0

Retail 4.0 has led to the creation of more efficient and productive business practices with the help of advanced technologies. Big players are already using cost-effective alternatives for traditional methods. Businesses are now focusing on creating seamlessly integrated and data-driven business models. Such business models prioritize end-to-end transparency and communication to fulfill consumer demands and manage inventories. But, planning and implementation of such business practices along with the deployment of the necessary technologies is a complicated task. Hence, organizations need a roadmap to approach retail 4.0 in the most effective way possible. The roadmap involves the following steps:

Since several technologies and business models are required for adapting to retail 4.0, hiring experienced professionals with niche skills is essential.

Creating effective strategies and allocating sufficient budget for infrastructure.
Updating existing systems to integrate new technologies.
Generating analytics to understand the changing industry trends as well as the organization’s performance in the market.
Educating employees about every technology being deployed and the effects of such technologies on the work culture.
Promoting the development of applications that ensure better consumer experience.

In the near future, Blockchain will be a part of the global retail market where payrolls, supply chain management, investments, and purchases will be handled with the help of a transparent ledger. Therefore, the possibilities for retail 4.0 are endless. Hence, retail organizations need to stay updated about new technologies and business practices and adopt a holistic approach for retail 4.0.