Why digital transformation is key to the survival of the retail industry?

The retail industry is the fastest changing amongst all industries, with consumers demanding new products from retailers every three to six months. If the retailers aren’t dynamic enough to provide what the market is looking for, they lose positions and profit extremely quickly. Up until four years ago, retailers could easily offer a product or set of products in one season or year. Nowadays, this time slot is every four to six weeks or at least two new products per year.

The only way to be that dynamic is to have an environment which is able to change within a few weeks or maximum a few months. So, every retailer’s number one goal for their digital transformation needs to be the basis of a fast-changing environment.

Most of the innovations and applications created in the last four to five years open up the potential to save time and money once implemented, such as AWS, Microservices based integrations, most of the ePOS platforms or technologies like NFC or the new generations of RFID. 

The key is not to focus on what is used in the retail industry, but to look at the process you are changing and the problem you are solving and then find a solution regardless the industry. Do you remember when Apple created the first iPhone, which merged three main functionalities in one – music, phone and the internet? They reinvented the phone as a product, but if you look behind the scenes, Apple wouldn’t be able to turn the idea into a product if they were not digitally ready. 

Twelve years later, we can take any smart phone and use it as a replacement of sorts for so many devices in-store, from scanning bar codes to taking payments, to click and collect orders, stock finder, stock inventory, stock allocation and so on.

Change the perception and you can use the same smart phone in-store to send promotional or marketing data to your customers. Change perception again and you can use it for internal communication between stores. The possibilities are endless. The game today is how fast retailers are implementing the “digital enablers” and how quickly the IT team will move to more flexible cloud-based, microservices-based, and so on platforms to enable the enablers.

Here is my question to you: What your Digital Transformation enables you today?