Unlocking Business Value with Process Orchestration in Retail

This is Part 7 of my Unlocking Business Value series. See also articles for Financial Services, Insurance, Public Sector, Nonprofits, Manufacturing, Telecommunications and Healthcare Payers.?

The retail industry is experiencing significant transformations due to various factors such as the macroeconomic climate, technological advancements, and changing consumer behavior. One notable change is the rise of e-commerce platforms, which have become a standard way for consumers to shop and have greatly influenced their expectations and habits. Some e-commerce platforms are also expanding into physical retail stores. Meanwhile, traditional brick-and-mortar stores are adapting by integrating online platforms, utilizing data analytics for personalized marketing, and enhancing the in-store experience with features like beacon technology to send personalized notifications and offers to shoppers based on their location within the store.? For most large retailers, the ability to provide seamless omnichannel customer experiences is becoming increasingly important.

To thrive in the future, retailers must embrace these changes, prioritize seamless shopping and customer service experiences, and consistently innovate to meet the ever-changing needs and expectations of customers. By doing so, they can stand out from the competition, foster customer loyalty, and position themselves as industry leaders. Retailers that excel in these areas will be the ones who succeed and pull ahead in the years ahead.? Conversely, those who poorly adapt may ultimately face existential risk.?

What challenges do retailers face in their digital evolution?? Embracing this change is not straightforward due to factors like integrating legacy Point of Sale (POS) systems, dealing with disconnected proprietary systems, and lacking centralized governance. These obstacles prevent current value from being realized and hinder the unlocking of new business potential. Addressing these issues with traditional development techniques can be complex, time-consuming, and costly, and it often leads to substantial technical debt.

Process orchestration is a vital capability for retailers to accelerate, empower, and reduce the risk of their digital transformation efforts. It simplifies and expedites the implementation of complex, integrated enterprise processes, improving efficiency, enhancing customer experience, and providing real-time visibility. By automating and coordinating core business processes, retailers can optimize operations, offer seamless customer journeys, and swiftly adapt to market changes. Process orchestration enables retailers to embrace change, create seamless shopping experiences, and achieve better business outcomes, gaining a competitive edge while effectively serving customers.

Let’s discuss these benefits of process orchestration in more detail:?

1?? Improved operational efficiency: By automating and coordinating various retail processes, such as inventory management, order fulfillment, and customer service, process orchestration can streamline operations, reduce manual tasks, diminish errors, and optimize resource utilization.? By freeing employees from repetitive and mundane tasks, process orchestration not only streamlines operations and optimizes resource utilization but also increases employee satisfaction by allowing them to focus on more meaningful and fulfilling work.

2?? Enhanced customer experience: Process orchestration enables retailers to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience across different channels, such as online platforms, physical stores, and mobile applications. It ensures timely order processing, accurate inventory information, and personalized interactions, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

3?? Agile response to market changes: Retailers face dynamic market conditions, such as changing customer demands, fluctuating inventory levels, and evolving competition. Process orchestration allows retailers to quickly adapt to these changes by automating real-time data integration, decision-making, and process adjustments, enabling them to stay competitive and responsive.

4?? Cost savings: By automating and optimizing retail processes, process orchestration can help reduce operational costs associated with manual labor, inventory inefficiencies, and process bottlenecks. It enables retailers to achieve better resource allocation, minimize waste, and improve overall cost-effectiveness.

5?? Scalability and growth: As retailers expand their operations, process orchestration provides the flexibility to scale processes seamlessly as needed. It allows retailers to handle increased order volumes, integrate new sales channels, and onboard new suppliers or partners without disrupting existing operations, ensuring smooth business growth.? More commonly, an ability to handle burst or seasonal workloads such as Black Friday is critical for many retailers.? Zalando, Europe's largest online fashion platform, faced challenges in automating their complex order processing system. They chose Camunda as their process orchestration solution due to its configurability and scalability.? Decathlon turned to Camunda to update its monolithic system due to changes in sales methods and to overcome scalability limitations. Camunda 8’s Zeebe workflow engine has a particular advantage here with its cloud-native, resilient and highly scalable architecture.?

6?? Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG): Process orchestration is a valuable tool for retailers to achieve their ESG goals by optimizing and automating various processes. Through this approach, retailers can streamline their operations and make significant progress in sustainability efforts. Paper-dependent processes can be fully automated, eliminating the expense and waste of handling paper (this can add up quickly, with a composite savings of $255K in year one alone).? They can effectively monitor and control energy usage, waste management, and carbon emissions, reducing their environmental impact.? By optimizing inventory management, retailers can reduce waste and improve resource allocation.? Process orchestration helps retailers maintain social responsibility by automating compliance checks and monitoring supplier performance, mitigating risks related to labor rights violations or unsafe working conditions. Overall, process orchestration empowers retailers to align their operations with ESG goals, promoting sustainability, transparency, and social responsibility.??

7?? Visibility: Process Orchestration enables managers to have a comprehensive and real-time understanding of retail and supply chain processes, including status, efficiency, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This benefit empowers and augments all of the other benefits of process orchestration.? It enables managers to identify bottlenecks swiftly, tackle challenges, and constantly refine processes for optimal performance.??

Overall, process orchestration in retail can drive operational efficiency, enhance customer experience, enable agility, reduce costs, and support scalable growth, leading to improved business performance and competitiveness.? These are all key to thriving in a complex, evolving retail landscape.?

Now let’s cover some of the use cases where these benefits can be applied:?

? Unified Customer Experience: Process orchestration allows retailers to provide a consistent and personalized experience across multiple channels, such as online, mobile, and physical stores. It ensures that customer interactions, preferences, and purchase history are synchronized, enabling a seamless transition between channels.? Unified account history, self-checkout, paperless mobile payment and invoice systems improve brand perception, reduce paper use and positively shift the buyer behaviors towards more sustainable practices.? Walmart took a platform approach with Camunda to achieve a true omni-channel experience. It allowed them to overcome complexity and gain visibility and control over the core business process behind all the channels in a time- and cost-efficient way: “solve it once - reuse many times”.??

? Order Management: With process orchestration, retailers can efficiently manage orders placed through various channels, including online, mobile apps, call centers, and in-store. It ensures real-time inventory visibility, order tracking, and fulfillment across all channels, enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing order errors.

? Order Fulfillment: Process orchestration can streamline the end-to-end order fulfillment process, ensuring efficient coordination between inventory management, order processing, and shipping. This reduces delays, minimizes errors, and improves customer satisfaction.? For retailers offering click and collect services, process orchestration can automate the entire process, from order placement to item preparation and customer pickup. This ensures a seamless experience for customers and optimizes resource allocation for the retailer.

? Customer Service: Process orchestration enables retailers to streamline customer service processes, such as handling inquiries, complaints, and returns, across different touchpoints. It ensures a unified view of customer interactions and enables efficient resolution, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.? For example, managing product returns can be expensive, complex and time-consuming. Process orchestration can automate the returns process, integrating it with inventory management and customer service systems. This reduces processing time, improves accuracy, and helps retain customer loyalty.

? Supply Chain Management: Process orchestration can optimize supply chain operations by automating processes such as demand forecasting, inventory replenishment, and supplier collaboration. It improves supply chain visibility, reduces stockouts, and enables highly efficient inventory management.? Additionally, process orchestration enables retailers to enhance supply chain transparency, ensuring ethical sourcing and minimizing transportation emissions.

? Promotions and Pricing: Coordinating promotional campaigns and pricing changes across various channels and systems can be challenging. Process orchestration can automate these processes, ensuring consistent pricing and promotions across online and offline channels, reducing manual effort, and improving revenue generation.

? Personalized Marketing: By integrating customer data from various channels, process orchestration enables retailers to deliver targeted and personalized marketing campaigns. It allows for the automation of customer segmentation, campaign execution, and tracking, resulting in more relevant and effective marketing messages.? Process orchestration also allows Marketing teams to monitor the performance of A/B tests in real-time through dashboards and analytics. This helps in identifying successful variations and making data-driven decisions for optimizing marketing strategies.

? Loyalty Programs: Process orchestration facilitates the management of loyalty programs across channels. It enables retailers to track customer loyalty, manage rewards, and provide a seamless experience for customers to earn and redeem loyalty points, ultimately fostering customer retention and advocacy.

Process orchestration plays a pivotal role in unlocking business value in the retail industry. It enables retailers to adapt to the evolving landscape, prioritize seamless, omni-channel customer experiences, and make data-driven decisions. By automating and streamlining operational processes, retailers can improve efficiency, enhance the customer experience, gain real-time visibility, and increase agility. Process orchestration also leads to cost savings, scalability, and growth opportunities. With its ability to provide business managers with real-time insights, process orchestration empowers them to optimize operations, embrace change, and achieve better business outcomes. By leveraging process orchestration, retailers can gain a competitive edge, thrive in the complex, evolving retail landscape, and serve customers more effectively.

If you're interested in learning more about process orchestration or wish to share your experiences in the retail sector, feel free to reach out or leave a comment below!??

Read more:?

Process Automation Forum Live: Retail

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