One of the most apparent impacts of disruption is how it has irreversibly changed the world of retail. The emerging consumer preferences and business dynamics have served as catalysts, and retailers must take stock and reassess how they will navigate the new retail landscape and tackle the shift.
Catching up to a world that’s changing can seem daunting. Still embarking on the change can be made less painful by harnessing data within the business to guide key decision-makers in the future.
Handle Data Silos
Retailers must break down data silos in order to access and harvest data in a meaningful way. With SaaS applications proliferating, data silos are created inadvertently. When more systems and processes are added, data is traversed from an initial portal downstream to another specific application. By the time data is analyzed, it has been duplicated across a plethora of applications, making it challenging to synchronize between partners or customers.
Related White Paper: Self-Service Integration – Empower Business Users and Increase IT Productivity
Retail, despite advancements in technology, has remained siloed. Often retailers with a long history leverage legacy system that turn inefficient and fail to use data correctly and promptly. If they completely overhaul the business’s front-and back-end systems, chances are pretty high that it would cause downtime for retail ecosystems to survive. This is where the self-service-enabled data integration approach can help.
Take a Self-Service Approach
Creating data connections using a point-to-point approach can be a mammoth task, but there is an easier way. Businesses can leverage self-service integration to create a single focal point that sits in disparate systems, tapping into the data residing in silos and enabling it to be harnessed in the right way.
So, instead of building point-to-point connections between systems, a timely and expensive process, self-service integration enables users to access customer information, order status, real-time inventory and pricing, all of which were previously locked away in data silos. And all this can be done in minutes instead of months.
Self-service integration enables all non-technical business users to create data connections and integrate new customers or partners at the speed of business. They can leverage pre-built application connectors, shared templates, dashboards or intuitive screens, etc. to monitor and use large volumes of data (that got stuck in data silos) for faster decision-making and value generation. By onboarding and creating connections faster, retailers can deliver on their customer expectations and increase delight further.
While business users create data connections and exchange data, IT or developer teams can take up the role of governance and control and focus on more high-value tasks instead. This saves a lot of time and improves the efficiency of operations and processes.
The pace of change within the retail sector is backing down anytime soon, so it’s important that organizations take the advantage of retail data and use the insights to take their business ahead. By taking a self-service integration approach, they can savor the advantage and drive digital transformation projects. By doing so, they can put their non-technical team members at forefront of the business and IT teams as stewards of innovation and growth.