IDC held its "IDC Insights Predictions 2010: Retail" web briefing last Wednesday, January 13, 2010. Leading the call were IDC Retail Insights analysts Leslie Hand, Ivano Ortis, and Group Vice President Bob Parker.
The conference call provided insights into current driving forces impacting retailers (including Sustainability, POS systems and RFID, and customer experience) and important IT investment trends for 2010 in the area of supply chain, demand planning, merchandising, and point-of-sale (POS) business initiatives.
Certainly, the economy had a big impact on retail in 2009 and that trend is expected to continue in 2010. However, retail will begin emerging in 2010 with new business models and perhaps new industry leaders.
Here’s a summary of the 10 predictions IDC provided on the conference call.
- Growth Strategies: IDC says that in 2010, retailers will seek growth strategies based on “Same Shopper” sales and first time buyers.
- New IT Investment Strategies: IDC predicts retailers will launch aggressive technology investment programs to support new business models while reducing traditional IT costs.
- Getting More Value From Supply Chains: Retailers will extract more value from their supply chains, responding adeptly to customer, supplier, and regulatory influences.
- Devil is in the Details: IDC says that retailers reach nirvana where PLM information informs intelligent automation
- Customer Experience: Retailers will focus on customer experience solutions convergence. CRM, SCM, and BI applications on a single source of demand information.
- Mobile Shopping: IDC expects retailers will drive mobile consumer interaction and this will usher in the open shopping era.
- Demand Information To Drive Customer Loyalty: Retailers will work on building customer intimacy and loyalty while improving brand performance.
- Harvesting Intelligence: IDC says that in 2010, retail investment in demand intelligence and BI will be driven by a need to lower inventory costs and be more customer centric.
- Sustainability Initiatives: IDC predicts retailers will build sustainable lean enterprises
- Social Commerce: IDC cleverly states that traditional retailers are on the Titanic and the approaching iceberg is online social commerce.
The formal part of the call ended with the IDC team reviewing their four pillars of investment for retailers. Here’s a summary of the four pillars.
- Drive IT Infrastructure savings
- Harvest Demand Intelligence
- Drive Improved Customer Experience
- Improve The Supply Network
The four pillars seem pretty obvious when I look at them…and you could make the case that those pillars have been important for decades and will still be important for many more decades to come.
For more information
- You can access the 60 minute web briefing via IDC Insights Predictions 2010: Retail
- The full predictions document Worldwide Retail Industry 2010 Top 10 Predictions
- IDC Insights Retail Community
- IDC Insights Retail Newsletter
- IDC’s Worldwide Retail Industry 2010 Top 10 Predictions
Point-of-sale business initiatives are highly underestimated and highly effective in 95% of the successful business ventures.
Posted by: POS software system | November 07, 2010 at 12:02 PM
In last year's predictions, we discussed an industry that was bracing for a difficult year. We also posited that the economic difficulties would create an environment for fundamental change in the industry, forever changing how the industry approached their business, with a particular emphasis on winning the new retail reality through an improved, technology-enabled approach to customer experience. This is exactly what happened. Information technology really proved its value in the crisis, enabling informed responses to industry conditions, ushering in an industry reset for a new economic reality.
Posted by: retailersdirect.net | June 20, 2012 at 03:41 AM