Tel Aviv, New York, – 22 August:

Onebeat, a leading provider of AI-enabled supply chain solutions for retailers, announced that it had achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Retail Competency.  This recognition highlights Onebeat’s dedication to assisting retailers in generating margins through operational excellence and expanding operations beyond the limits of human capabilities.

Onebeat’s achievement of AWS Retail Competency is a testament to its commitment to providing retailers with cutting-edge, AI-driven solutions. The company’s unique AI-driven platform helps retailers optimize in-season inventory levels, ensuring the correct inventory placement and allocation based on real-time demand fluctuations.

“As an AWS Retail Competency Partner, we’re committed to democratizing access to advanced solutions in a very complex environment,” says Viki Slavin, COO of Onebeat.

“Our In season AI solution empowers retailers to optimize in-season sales, reduce slow-moving inventory, and execute optimal decisions on a daily basis. We help retailers of all sizes prosper with our solution. With Onebeat, the top-down vision aligns with bottom-up reality by synchronizing business operations to capitalize on daily market needs. We use AI to boost In-season sell-through and increase Margins.  

Onebeat‘s solution stands on three fundamental pillars that shape inventory and merchandise planning: availability, assortment, and freshness. By aligning a store’s stock mix to sell products at full price, retailers can seize opportunities at the early stages of each season, promising impressive sell-through results.

“Onebeat’s recognition with the AWS Retail Competency underscores our dedication to the industry. This recognition from AWS is a testament to our technical expertise, commitment to high standards, and our proven success in the retail realm”, says Shani Abramovich-Volkovitz, VP of Partnerships at Onebeat. “Our platform empowers retailers to make data-driven decisions, boosting profitability and streamlining operations.”

Onebeat’s innovative approach has already been trusted by over 180 retailers across 26 countries in various retail sectors, from fashion, footwear, liquor, consumer electronics, and more. Onebeat offers a complimentary assessment of your inventory health through the AWS Marketplace. This assessment allows you to understand the potential benefits that Onebeat can bring to your operations without disturbing your existing processes.

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ShopMate, for example, uses AI to generate customizable shopping suggestions for e-commerce, personalizing the shopping experience for each customer. Branchbob.ai, an AI-powered platform, enables merchants to swiftly and seamlessly create fully functional online stores, making the transition to online retail smoother. In terms of sales, tools like RevFit AI provide sophisticated sales forecasting and qualification, aiding businesses in their strategic planning. Additionally, SalesMind AI tailors marketing strategies for each client, leveraging AI to ensure that marketing efforts are as effective as possible.

Tech giants are also getting involved in AI retail. Google announced just weeks ago that its new AI shopping feature will let users virtually try on clothes.

The retail landscape is challenging, with shrinking margins and mounting operational complexities. When implementing groundbreaking technologies like AI, retailers rightfully expect significant breakthroughs in customer service and bottom-line results. However, many generative AI applications still fall short of delivering the profound impact desired, leaving them relegated to the realm of amazing toys.

Within the intricate world of retail, there are numerous touchpoints, including store management, e-commerce, merchandise planning, supply chain operations, seasonal promotions and more. Each domain requires its own set of rules and expertise and an unfathomable number of daily choices. The real challenge lies in synchronizing these various facets daily to create the best possible outcomes.

Today, AI integration within existing workflows and tools has become common practice. Advanced analytics tools now incorporate AI to generate reports, enhancing accuracy and efficiency. Retailers leverage sophisticated statistical models and AI capabilities for improved pre-season planning, personalized recommendations, and optimized discounts on slow-moving items. These AI-enhanced tools undoubtedly contribute to retailers’ bottom line.

However, it is crucial to acknowledge that this integration represents the current mainstream adoption of AI in retail. These AI-powered tools offer incremental improvements, but they are not yet at the stage of fully autonomous AI-driven systems. It is essential to envision a future where AI has a more profound impact, transforming retail operations from their core with little to no human intervention – this is where the real game-changer emerges.

Inertia often dictates the development of existing tools, as exemplified by word processing software. Originally designed with a focus on printing, they were limited to text and images. However, the rise of web-based interaction has brought about a shift in the fundamentals, allowing for the support of multimedia documents.Yet the word page format is still following the standard printing paper. Similarly, the integration of AI into retail workflows has the potential to revolutionize the industry beyond incremental enhancements.

As retail domain experts and visionaries, we must recognize the immense potential of AI integration to reshape the way we manage inventory. By embracing AI’s capabilities and breaking free from the limitations of existing systems, we can create a future where inventory management is fully controlled by AI. 

This notion may seem like a distant dream, but let’s consider the example of Voyager – NVIDIA’s Minecraft model. In a remarkable feat of AI advancement, NVIDIA embarked on a project to train a model to play the popular game Minecraft. The project showcased the ability of the AI model to learn and improve its gameplay skills without human intervention. During the training process, the AI model learned to navigate the Minecraft world, gather resources, and accomplish various tasks. It exhibited a remarkable understanding of the game’s mechanics and was able to adapt its strategies to different scenarios. The results were truly impressive. The AI model outperformed previous state-of-the-art techniques, achieving milestones and unlocking key elements of the game at a significantly faster pace

By giving AI agents like Voyager access to relevant data and teaching them the logistics constraints of retail, we can envision a future where they autonomously make decisions and optimize inventory management. This represents a groundbreaking shift, where AI becomes a truly independent and invaluable asset in the retail industry.

In conclusion, the integration of AI into retail workflows holds tremendous potential for transforming inventory management. By breaking free from the limitations of traditional methods and embracing the vision of a future where AI takes the https://www.linkedin.com/in/avrumy-schreiber-127988142/reins, we can unlock new levels of efficiency, profitability and customer satisfaction. As retail continues to evolve in the AI-driven era, it is crucial for industry leaders to recognize the transformative power of AI and seize the opportunity to redefine how inventory is managed. At Onebeat, we are committed to pioneering this shift and empowering retailers to harness the full potential of AI in their operations. Moving from Amazing Toys to Game-Changing Solutions

Avrumy Schreiber, VP Product at Onebeat, Web Intelligence & No-code expert. In love with tools, hacks, data, and innovative ideas.

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In one of my previous articles, “Rethinking Traditional Formats to Stay Relevant in Today’s Post-Covid Modern Retail Environment”, I discussed the post covid-19 global challenges to improve full-price sell-through. As of 2023, it is estimated that around 30% of all clothes made worldwide are never sold (Fashion United). This benchmark is very bad news for our planet and terrible news for retail managers that contemplate tactics, given that the next two seasons were already planned. More discounts will put the company’s short-term profitability at risk but also risk long-term brand positioning. 

The puzzling question is: why do retailers go so wrong in their plans when the technology available to them is so advanced? Today’s ready-to-use AI-based prediction models can use long-term historical data and predict variables like market sentiments and fashion trends which used to be limited to the opinion of experts. The somewhat disappointing reality is, that while AI-based planning has become so prominent today, it didn’t change much the benchmark of in-season sell-through, nor the unsold inventory share. 

In this article we will use common sense to challenge the convention that retailers need better season planning to finish seasons without unsold inventory. We will describe the inherent negative spiral of the fashion industry and use a cause-and-effect approach to find its root cause. Eventually, we will illustrate the in-season methods and AI tools that have the power to considerably mitigate the dead inventory catch. On a personal note, I truly hope that this article will serve as some relief for central merchandisers, planners and supply chain directors that are operating in over-stressed environments and are unjustly held accountable for poor season results.  

Why is Fashion Retail in a negative spiral?

Let us assume a retail environment with no noise factors. New inventory is delivered to the distribution center on time and in full. Consumers visit the stores, browse through the assortment of new products, and buy according to their preferences. We can call the products that are sold well fast movers and those that do not sell well slow movers. We, of course, want to produce only fast movers, but the reality is that fast movers and slow movers are distributed according to the 20-80 rule when a collection is composed of multiple styles, colors, and sizes. Much of the collection will turn out to be slow movers, while only a few products will turn out to be fast movers. Since the fast movers naturally sell faster than planned, they run out of stock for replenishment fast, and their share in the store decreases over time. With more collections coming in, the shelf is occupied by more slow movers, and less fast movers, and less space is left available to display new products – consumers’ chance to find the product that they desire in their size reduces sharply. Luckily for retailers, the End of Season Sale period is the time for the store to liquidate unsold inventory through deep discounts and start afresh. 

Over a decade of analyzing fashion retail data, we learned that over 50% of the stock on a shelf before the end of the season belongs to SKUs that contributed to merely 5% of the seasonal sales. Different criteria to identify slow movers will not change the distribution much, eventually, retailers were more wrong than right! Were the designers wrong? Or perhaps the planner? Thankfully, we have unlimited access to data today to know that this outcome had little to do with both. If we mapped inventory between different stores, we find that slow movers in one store can be categorized fast movers across numerous other stores. Fast movers and slow movers are mostly store-specific definitions. Tragically, the same fast movers that ran out of stock early in the season and led to loss of sales in one store, end up also losing margin in other stores when liquidated at end of season’s discounts. A simple cross-store analysis will reveal that stores had the capacity to sell more than 50% of the slow-moving inventory during the season if they had it at the right time and in the right place.

What is the root cause, then? 

We can safely assume now that the plan was approximately right, or at least not precisely wrong. Our search for root cause narrows down on in-season execution. 

The problem starts as early as retailers allocate new collections to stores. Statistics regarding sales are not yet available, and we cannot use our intuition either when it comes to predicting the sale rate of a specific style-color-size in a specific store. A common practice of retailers is to set size-curve norms to categories in stores. For example, if a pivotal size of a shirt sells two pcs a week on average in a high-street store, retailers can assume two pcs as an initial norm for the pivotal sizes of the same category across high-street stores. But we understand now that this average is a fallacy. It is an average of the few super-fast movers that can sell even ten pieces a week and many slow movers that did not sell any. Starting with over-inflated inventory in stores generates a high inventory of stores’ slow movers and restricts the inventory remaining at the warehouse for replenishment of the stores’ fast movers.

Knowing that the allocation plan is not rocket science, retailers attempt to adjust SKU norms based on actual demand in the season. The common approach is conventional forecast algorithms like rolling forecasts and dynamic MIN-MAX targets. The unfortunate mistake here is that the collection life can be as short as 4-6 weeks, and the average sale rate of a typical product is as low as 1-2 pcs in 2 weeks. In such a reality, these algorithms will either fail to respond to demand trends or constantly respond to noise. In simple words, by the time we get sufficient statistics for an accurate forecast, the season is over, and most inventory is misplaced in the wrong stores.       

How can we use AI to break out of the industry’s negative spiral? 

I’ve worked with data scientists over the years in search for the right mix of technology that will allow retailers to considerably improve their in-season operations through automation. We narrowed down on three areas in which AI led to breakthroughs:

1. Behavioral Clustering: A common AI technique that identifies and divides unlabeled data into different groups such that similar data points. If applied to SKU-Location level demand, this approach has the power to enable an effective transition from conventional forecasting into a fast-response Short-Term Prediction. The algorithm clusters products in real-time based on their identified demand pattern and adapts their target accordingly.     
2. Products Similarity: Learns the impact of product attributes and various combinations of product attributes on the demand for products. Well-known methods like “Features-Embedding” translate the semantic information in the data into a numerical form that the algorithms can understand and use to find which products are similar to each other. This capability leads to a far more intelligent allocation of new products based on learning gained from the behavior of similar products in previous seasons.  
3. Extreme Demand Prediction: Uses past seasons’ data to predict the potential demand changes and their impact on store inventory during special events or price-offs. While this topic was not discussed in this writing, it is another area that can fuel inventory mismatch between stores. The rapid increase in traffic calls for a proactive increase in inventory in stores to protect sales. Without the tools to guide retailers on which products are likely to absorb the demand increase, the common human approach is to error on the safe side and proportionally increase the inventory of all products unnecessarily.

Retailers that implemented these tactics demonstrated a 10%-20% increase in in-season sell-through, enjoying higher margins with less inventory in stores and higher freshness in the season. Finally, establishing more scalable and predictable operations where Merchandisers and Planners operate in harmony and extract more joy from their work.    

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Tel-Aviv, Israel & New York, NY – June 7, 2023 – Onebeat, a leading AI-enabled retail-tech company, secures $10M in additional funding to continue to expand its highly-adaptive retail platform, business operations and new business growth plans. Magenta Venture Partners led the Series B financing round and was joined by existing and new investors AnD Ventures, INcapital Ventures, J-Ventures, Surround Ventures and Wilson’s Bird Capital.

“We are thrilled to have a group of investors, led by Magenta Venture Partners, that are just as passionate as we are about the business and our future,” said Dr. Yishai Ashlag, Co-Founder & CEO of Onebeat. “We remain true to our mission of helping retailers, large and small, succeed by providing them with innovative tools and insights that enable them to make more informed, better business decisions and meet customer demand day in and day out.”

Onebeat is rapidly transforming today’s legacy SCM solutions and the costly consulting services often associated with it through its more modern, AI-enabled solution that offers greater flexibility and inventory visibility as well as a more affordable SaaS model, which is especially relevant for today’s mid-market retailers looking to cut costs and expand margins.

For example, implementing Onebeats’ solution has been shown to increase retailers’ net margins by over 40%, on average, and deliver immediate savings and return on investment to customers in year one, providing a significant competitive advantage in the retail industry. The company also replaces expensive traditional software providers and costly data analysis services from today’s Big Tech providers.

“With Onebeat, retailers can optimize their operations, reduce waste, and improve their bottom line, all while providing a better shopping experience for customers,” added Ran Levitzky, General Partner at Magenta Venture Partners. “Additionally, Onebeat’s commitment to sustainability helps address global ESG challenges by enabling a more environmentally conscious solution for the retail industry.”

During the last twelve months, Onebeat has more than doubled its client base, partnering with over 170 retailers across 26 countries and various retail sectors, including fashion, footwear, jewelry, pharmacy and beverage, among others. In addition, the company works with some of the world’s foremost, well-respected global retail leaders, such as Calvin Klein, American Eagle, Crocs and the retail division of TATA Group, just to name a few. 

Onebeat’s impressive growth is attributed to:

• Its leadership team and 30+ years of experience in retail and supply chain management,
• Focus on AI for improving daily inventory and merchandise decisions, and  
• Simplifying data integrations while increasing data integrity across disparate systems.  

Founded in 2018 by Dr. Yishai Ashlag and Avihai Shnabel, Onebeat spun out from Goldratt Consulting, an internationally acclaimed practice known for its supply chain expertise and the creator of the Theory of Constraints (TOC). TOC is a management philosophy introduced by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt in his 1984 book titled The Goal, that is geared to help organizations continually achieve their goals.

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Due to changing consumer demands and, most importantly, consumer behavior, the retail industry is evolving fast. A decade ago, we would see cities full of busy retail stores and consumers waiting for stock, even if it took a long time. Today, not only consumer purchasing power has become more volatile, but consumers have become more brand conscious. Hence, retailers need to tailor their retail management to understand; what motivates consumers and their purchasing decisions, what the current landscape of consumers looks like for physical retailers, and how technology is making all the difference in customer experience.

The Retail Reset for Brick-and-Mortar Owners

The retail industry has had its fair set of challenges pre and post-pandemic. In the current economic landscape, retail businesses struggle with balancing product prices amid surging inflation and ensuring the right product stays at the right place when consumers most need it. Retail owners have had to embrace digitalization and shape their business model into a more stable and profitable position.

Why retailers need to rethink how they operated in the past and how embracing technology will add value to a business:

• To reinforce consumer relationships – Responding to their needs and understanding the product categories consumers focus on will help drive value for the price.
• To deliver a better customer experience – Knowing which product is needed in which store will improve customers’ perception of your retailer. Without predictive data insights about product assortment and stock effectiveness, retailers risk losing customers to competitors.
• To enable agility in retail operations – It is not just about making quick decisions or implementing new tools. Enabled by retail technology, retailers can build highly efficient retail workflows.

It is not just about making quick decisions or implementing new tools. Enabled by retail technology, retailers can build highly efficient retail workflows.

However, there are many technological solutions available today. Often retailers need help understanding how and what to choose. Let’s simplify it –

• Is there a need for technology to solve the problem? The need for technology in an environment must be evaluated thoroughly. The evaluation can be a direct comparison of the effectiveness of technology against the existing process. Technology should contribute to resolving the current inefficiencies entirely or reduce them.
• Can an alternative approach be taken to resolve the issue at hand? Instead of relying on technology to solve a problem, we should explore the possibility of modifying existing processes to achieve the desired outcome. This maximizes the efficiency of technology resources and allows for more flexibility and adaptability in problem-solving.
• Benchmark the expectations–Even technology needs to be benchmarked. Any technology is a combination of users and algorithms. There must be systems in place to benchmark and monitor expectations. A compliance mechanism must be maintained to identify effectiveness.
• Clarity of ROI against spend on technology–Apart from basic operational technologies, all additional technology solutions must contribute to helping a retailer increase sales. Hence, ROI visibility must be checked.

When we discuss creating better customer experiences, the four key factors that should be considered are – optimizing inventory, increasing sell-through, improving store freshness, and deflating excess stock in stores. All these points in one direction – it is time to reset the traditional way of managing supply chains.

Consumer purchasing ebbs and flows with time. With their behavior becoming more complex to understand, an effective supply chain management strategy powered by digital retail innovation is as close as retailers can get to consumers today. That means offering the right product, price, and experience at the right time and place.

The bigger picture is for retailers to realize the potential of digital retail transformation. With the retail curve returning to normal, people are excited to re-discover the joy of brick-and-mortar shopping. At the same time, retailers have an opportunity to transform the shopper experience and maximize revenue simultaneously.

AI, Big Data, and DevOps automation are not simply technologies used to create digital retail software but are practices that should be deeply integrated into retail culture. They eliminate redundancy and errors in retail operations and help retailers focus on more creative and value-driven business tasks.

The winning way forward for physical retail owners is to leverage these next-gen retail innovations that will yield high ROIs and create sustainability in the retail business.Expert: Steve Jobs once said, “Technology by itself doesn’t make leaders. Technology only amplifies true leadership.”

The retail industry is evolving fast due to changing consumer demands. With their behavior becoming more complex to understand, an effective supply chain management strategy powered by digital retail innovation is as close as retailers can get to consumers today.

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Like many of our trusted partners, we loved our old look and logo.

And yet, we decided to evolve.

Our first logo was created to emphasize that every business needs to keep its beat. As in music, the beat represents the speed at which a track is played, a business survives when its people make the right decisions at the right time.

Change is an important step in every business. It is a defining moment for the future of our company. Our team and clients have nailed the business beat and now we are ready for a greater challenge – synchronizing all the retail aspects, from deep analytics to full execution. That’s why we chose new colors and a circle that represent:

Dark blue – as reflected in the sky and the oceans – emphasizes the knowledge and reliability we deliver in our solutions. 

Fuchsia pink – presents playfulness – our new design is clean, easy to use and even fun to handle! We believe good user experience is a key for achieving goals in such a complex environment. 

Circle – harmony, we constantly streamline all retail aspects, and improve in each iteration, based on each client’s unique situation.

We believe that even with different colors, we maintain the spirit of our original mission – provide high-resolution, high-frequency adaptive inventory & assortment management solutions to help retailers prosper and boost profitability.

We’ll not bore you with the design thinking and the meaning of every angle and curve of the new logo – you’re busy people. Our main intention for this post is to let you know about our new look, so you won’t be too surprised when the icons on your phone/laptop/tablet look a bit more joyful.

Today we are celebrating our new website’s launch. In the coming months, all of Onebeat’s visuals will align around this new brand. It’s still us but more recognizable.

Last but not least,
In order to enable our partners and clients to get full transparency and work with datasets of any size we’ve built a reliable, fast and secured data solution.

We facilitate integrations of client data sources with Hardware, Agents, APIs, VPNs, and more. You can pick the option that suits you best.

We’re grateful to make this change with our amazing partners and talented team.

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What is the future of physical retail stores? Does commerce on the streets and malls tend to end? Or be eclipsed by online sales? Personally, I don’t believe it. There are studies that support this thesis. Last year, Euromonitor released research that indicates that, at least until 2025, even with the growth trend in e-commerce, physical stores will continue to account for 82% of total sales. And it’s not just. Nothing indicates that this percentage will change quickly after that date. Another survey with American retailers – this one carried out by Wynshop companies, in partnership with Incisiv, specialized in digital transformation – reports that 86% of them are dissatisfied with the results (in other words, profitability) of the online arm of their business. It is certainly no different in the rest of the world. It is possible that, in some markets, this phenomenon may be even worse, due to logistics and infrastructure issues.

There is a charm in physical retail stores that is irreplaceable: the customer is attracted by the coordinated presentation in the store, being able to experience the experience idealized by the style, merchandising and product team, in addition to getting, on the spot, what he wants and leave the store carrying the product under your arm. Add to that your contact with the product, the touch, the experience of texture, aroma, weight, and fit. Enjoying this moment is especially comforting. As much as technology advances, and as delivery systems become effective and reduce delivery times, the pleasure of buying in person, of immediate consumption, will hardly be surpassed. At least, not so soon.

In the western world, shopping is an experience that is part of everyday life. Consuming is no longer a necessity, something mandatory and unavoidable, to supply a specific need. For millions of people, shopping goes much further. It is indeed a rewarding activity and, for many, it has become a leisure program.

Consolidated cultural systems do not tend to change so quickly. These rapid changes happen when a technological disruption occurs that adds unquestionable value to a product or service. You can’t compare streaming services like Netflix to old video stores. Likewise, Spotify cannot be equated with any music delivery system other than online. Or, still, the advantages of transport services by application in relation to the traditional taxi. The advance of these recent technologies in relation to those that preceded them is indisputable, and causes rapid change in customs. However, this is not the case with e-commerce, which adds a number of advantages to the sales process, but entails many other disadvantages.

Despite this, offline retail should be on the lookout. A priori, online commerce will continue to grow and companies in the sector will surely have to move towards the integration of offline and online. I also believe that any technology that can be added to improve the customer’s shopping experience should be evaluated and considered. Among them, technological systems that allow consumers to check different product options, combine pieces of clothing or other possibilities. After all, they can result in an increase in sales conversion, as well as facilitate and speed up the purchase and payment process. Here, the omnichannel concept gains relevance, in which the online versus offline duality ceases to exist and the platforms start to act in an integrated and complementary way. Surely, all of this is easier said than done. But technological changes gradually impose themselves and we have to deal with them.

My point is: to stay alive in increasingly competitive environments, retail must not neglect online, nor lose what characterizes its essence and profitability. I’m talking about ensuring coordination, attractiveness and availability of products, so that the consumer’s in-person shopping experience is not frustrated. Even because, if online still does not represent a real threat to the physical store, the competitor next door remains a risk. It has to be overcome. Thus, as long as physical retail is able to deliver a good shopping experience, it will hardly be surpassed – either online or by the competition. At least as long as the vast majority of humans choose to live in the real world and not in parallel digital worlds (metaverses).

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Head of engagement in Brazil

Metaverse, immersive experience, commerce anywhere, multiple payment systems, cryptocurrencies, drone delivery system and the like, are topics that, surely, must be inspiring many retailers. A good part of them enhanced the last NRF (National Retail Federation), the largest retail trends fair in the world, which takes place every year in New York. Certainly, these are innovations that have already impacted and will continue to disruptively impact retail in the coming years.

It is undeniable that those who work in retail need to be aware of them. Many, even, are already beginning to emerge here and there. Some brands stand out in this regard. Lacta, for example, launched a 3D, immersive 3600 virtual store at Christmas, with an eye on the metaverse concept, and is repeating the dose at Easter due to the good results. In winter, Aramis will launch its first phygital jacket (physical and digital), with electronic temperature control, which will be the company’s first digital product in NFT (non-fungible token). Wing, an Alphabet drone service, claims to have reached the milestone of 200,000 commercial deliveries in Australia. Foxbit Pay already offers cryptocurrency payment solutions.

However, every company must be aware of other issues that may compromise the success of these initiatives. Just as important as implementing technological structures that contribute to improving the shopping experience, is minimizing the risk of the customer not finding the product he wants at the point of sale. Every effort made to attract the customer’s attention, and arouse interest in the purchase, cannot end in frustration because the product he is looking for has not been exposed or available, due to a rupture caused by a failure in inventory management, for example.

Innovation is very important, as is being aware of trends, but we cannot neglect what is the essence of retail: having the product available in the right quantity and model, whenever and wherever the consumer needs it. Preferably, in an organized, lit, safe store with a well-trained service team or in a responsive and intuitive digital environment, with a value and shipping term that do not conspire against sales.

Today we have alternatives available on the market that help in this regard and that, in my opinion, can prepare the company to guarantee an optimized and sustainable operation. This is very important to achieve success when we decide to adopt a technological vanguard posture.

Every technological advance is welcome and must be evaluated according to the characteristics of each company and the value it adds to the business. However, we cannot lose sight of the fact that retail means delivering to the customer what he wants when he wants it. This is critical. It’s not just about losing a sale, it’s about frustrating the customer’s desire to buy, which, worse, can even direct their resources towards the acquisition of the competition. A good presence in Metaverso starts with ensuring an excellent consumer experience in the physical store as well.

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Head of Onebeat Brazil

ESG was one of the hottest topics at NFR 2022, the world’s premier retail event. Acronym for “environmental, social and corporate governance”, ESG is an approach focused on integrating and expanding best environmental, social and governance practices. Today, any company that intends to seek investment needs to demonstrate that it has made a commitment to good ESG practices. What used to be a differential is now a prerequisite, as a seal that attests to responsibility towards the market, society, consumers, investors and other stakeholders.

Much has already been said on the subject, but I will try to look at it from a different perspective than the traditional one.

Have you ever stopped to think that every retailer, from the purchase and assortment planning, is already somehow impacting the environmental and social future? I’ll take the fashion industry as an example. Anyone who works in the retail of this market knows that the volume of leftovers in a collection is simply gigantic, they are the famous leftovers.

Usually, the direct undesirable effect on every executive’s head is the loss of profit margin due to liquidation and/or the extension of this stock for future collections, impacting working capital and the quality of the next collection. However, perhaps a secondary impact should also be noted. For example, an article published by the Daily Mail Online in January of this year draws attention, showing that every year 39,000 tons of clothes are discarded directly in the Atacama Desert, in Chile, with much of this volume not even having any use.

This invites us to reflect. Good planning, purchasing more assertively and, perhaps even more importantly, distributing in line with demand, would certainly contribute to a significant reduction in leftovers. The impact of this goes beyond the company’s profitability and financial health. It would have a direct impact on the reduction of consumption of raw materials, water, electricity, fuel and a series of other inputs and resources, reducing the environmental liabilities generated by the manufacture of products.

Sometimes it may seem that preserving the environment is something far removed from our daily lives, something for ecologists or specialized professionals. But, in fact, if we look carefully around us, if we observe our personal and professional practices, we can surely find alternatives to contribute. Improving management, in order to reduce waste, is certainly one of them.

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Where there’s digitization there is thoughtful technological adoption. DevOps has emerged as the most pressing customer-oriented technology adopted by organizations with the retail industry being third in place in the DevOps application market. In India, retail technology supporting the retail sector with services such as digital ledgers, inventory management, payments solutions, and tools for logistics and fulfillment have witnessed a significant growth. But here is what makes DevOps and Retail a perfect match: At the heart of both DevOps and Retail, we will find the most essential human element which is to bridge the gap that allows teams to ship better reliable products. In other words, allowing retail owners to achieve operational excellence and business continuity.

DevOps and Retail: 2 sides of the same coin

Organizations look to differentiate themselves and create customer loyalty by focusing on customer experience and analysing how technology can enable individualized service that can scale to meet demand. Companies are adopting digital transformation strategies to compete and decrease their time to market. It requires persistence to architect such a reliable and robust system.  

Retailers and tech companies are blending DevOps technology with retail processes to enhance customer experiences, personalize interactions throughout the sales funnel and elevate their fulfillment processes to make it all possible, as fast as possible. Automation is the backbone of digital operations. In DevOps, automation is infused in every development stage and in retail automation enables faster efficient workflows at every stage of business using data analytics. 

Let’s understand the fundamentals of how the processes in DevOps and retail can be glued together for retailers to drive ROI:

1. Current reality – DevOps was born from collaboration between developer and operations teams to ship a qualified code as fast as possible to users. Today, DevOps lifecycle is designed to optimize and ensure the rapid delivery of only high-quality code to the end-clients. How? By increasing the utilization of written code to deliver more valuable and faster features to clients. In retail, almost 50% of inventory items are either not sold or end up being sold at slashed prices. This means retail owners lose revenue compared to the estimated profit. It is important to streamline inventory operations. Why? To enable more sales during the beginning of seasons with better prices, yielding a much better profitability margin. In commonality, we can say the main time to respond to market needs is crucial to build competitive advantage both for software and retail companies.
   
   
2. Reinforcement – One of the most important factors why high-performing companies adopt DevOps is to reduce their Mean Time To Detect and Mean Time To Repair downtimes. A Denial-of-Service of any application results in that many customers lost to the competitor. It is just like in retail, where owners commonly face the problem of not having the right item at the right place. The winning way is to find the best technology for product allocation that can consistently facilitate the production cycle.
   
   
3. DevOps culture – With continuous integration and continuous delivery cycles through agile code mechanisms, automation, and deployments, DevOps ensures a quality product is built. A product that can service faster and save huge technology investment, thus, being cost-effective. A great service, especially, timely and fast service is crucial for retailing as customers that look for a product at one place might find themselves searching at a different store due to unavailability. It is important to continuously monitor customer buying preferences in stores to avoid unavailability of stock and ensure a much better service which eventually translates to higher ROI.
   
   
4. Automation – DevOps’s “Automate Everything” mantra minimizes human intervention. In retail, there’s not enough eyes and time to avoid mistakes or for repetitive manual work that keeps causing errors. This consumes the time retailers need to focus on creativity and improvement. DevOps is about avoiding rework by creating automated gates to release only quality work into production and automating repetitive tasks freeing people’s time for creative work. With integration of DevOps Automation in retail will streamline business decisions based on aggregation and processing of data. Retail companies should have a software in place that focuses on managing the large inventory data and providing insights based on data analysis in a cost-efficient manner.

The power of continuous improvement approach

“Companies are investing in the wrong places or investing too much (or too little) in the right ones. But the fact that high performers exist in every industry indicates that some companies are getting it right.” – The Case for Digital Reinvention, McKinsey  

Companies adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions experience faster workflows and give better customer service. DevOps should be an integral and cultural part of retail enterprises that look to unclog inventory pipelines, efficient inventory management, improve performance, and yield profitability.  

The same applies to the retail industry. With DevOps as a Service increasingly gaining prominence, retailers today have a way to optimize their customer experiences smoothly. They must discover and identify the core of their business and implement the rest as a service. With established next-gen retail innovation built around product and customer centricity, retailers can speed up their production and supply process. All-in-all DevOps in retail has the power to identify transformation objectives, drive retail operations using data, and improve revenue cycles. 

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