In the current business environment, the retail industry faces two major challenges that threaten its profitability and the long-term survival prospects. The twin challenges are:
Competition– To beat the competition, retailers have to understand consumer demand at the point of interaction and respond to the various inputs in real time across the enterprise. This calls for a proactive approach on the part of the retail organization to sense the specific requirements of the consumer before other competitors and respond to them in real-time ensuring customer satisfaction in the process.
Moreover, margins in the retail business generally are very low and that removes any scope for waste or inefficiencies in the business processes. Efficiency is critical to survive in the retail industry. A proactive approach on the part of the retail organization requires an enterprise wide monitoring and control of the various business processes that may ultimately lead to the desired efficiencies and long-term customer satisfaction and profitability.
Regulatory pressures– In order to meet the regulatory standards, the retailers require an enterprise wide process visibility, data access and near-instant performance reporting. However, the need for flexibility, process efficiency, reliable information, and responsiveness is very hard to achieve given the existing portfolio of legacy, home grown and packaged software applications used by a majority of the retail organizations.
Therefore, a retail business would benefit immensely from an integrated IS infrastructure which continuously monitors and dispatches the necessary information of the flow of goods all the way from supplier to the cash register and then back to accounting as well as other functions of the retail organization. A combination of flexibility, process efficiency, reliable information and responsiveness is critical to a retail business and ERP packages have been introduced to tackle the elimination of IT complexity albeit with some implementation challenges to the line of business and IT management staff. How Complete Suite ERP Helps with Software Solution:
