Retail challenge – Never has the interaction between retail and technology been as exciting as it is today. Innovation is driving retailers to reinvent themselves. From the individual shopping experience to the intelligent supply chain, as digital transformation unfolds the possibilities are endless.

In his Inspire session, Microsoft Retail Lead Sahir Anand explored the challenges and opportunities in retail and how you can drive change in the industry. Here’s a re-cap of some of the topics he touched on!

Forces of Change – Why the retail industry is changing

The retail sector is subject to major influencing factors, which bring about enormous changes through their considerable pressure. Digitization acts as an additional accelerator for these changes. It is therefore all the more important to find long-term answers to the most pressing issues facing the retail industry as quickly as possible:

• Declining consumer brand loyalty
• More complex decision making in the purchasing proces
• Fluctuating commodity prices impacting profit margins
• Increasing competitive pressure
• Explosion of customer data

Companies are therefore faced with major challenges if they want to grow in the increasingly occupied retail landscape. In addition to the influencing factors mentioned above, following additional measures must be taken:

• Avoidance of stock outages
• Reliable competitive analysis
• Increase of distribution depth
• Increase of sales productivity

Empowering Retail – How digitization can help you outpace competition

Take advantage of digital disruption for innovative services and partnerships. Digitize your business to experience the future of retail. Here?s how:

1. Engage your customers
Focus on your customers and use technologies that enable individual and personal contact. This increases loyalty and retention.

2. Empower your employees
Inspire your employees with role-optimized solutions that enable them to offer outstanding service and at the same time intensify cooperation and exchange.

3. Optimize your operations
Deliver an intelligent platform that enables data-driven business innovation on a trusted, highly secure, and global foundation.

4. Transform your products
Manage a pipeline of ideas aligned with strategic priorities to bring innovative products and services to market quickly and effectively, increasing brand differentiation, competitiveness and customer value.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail, you get all the tools you need. We are happy to show you in detail how you can benefit from the Microsoft industry solution for retail. Contact us!