Thanks to Peter Witham, Director and Retail Lead, UNIT4 Business Software for taking the time to answer a few questions about the current state of the retail market, technology based solutions to help retailers, and about the use of the cloud.
Thanks to Peter Witham for his time, and for his very comprehensive responses. They are greatly appreciated.
What does the retail market like right now?
Peter Witham: The back-to-school season signals the start of push to the year-end and important holiday buying. The National Retail Federation anticipates U.S. families spending about seven percent less than they did last year on back-to-school purchases; so retailers are deploying a variety of sales strategies to lure shoppers and their dollars into their stores as well as online. Customer-facing technology and apps – both social and mobile – are being used to attract and keep buyers. It is a time of constant change, continued optimism and strategies to stay top of mind with customers.
Social and mobile are indeed good strategies to get shoppers in early and often, but what else could a retailer do from a technology standpoint to be successful?
Peter Witham: Understandably, retailers most often focus on the front end of their technology and their operational systems, because that is where the customers are. Increasingly, astute retailers are learning new ways to get the most mileage out of their back office systems, and using them in innovative ways.
For example, an average finance system helps by running day, month and quarter reports. Good systems can be equipped with some basic analysis tools that can help decipher more data and run more reports. Best-of-class financial systems, such as UNIT4 Coda, can help retailers do drill down analyses based on real-time data resident in both the front-end and back-end, because they integrate seamlessly and are based on a single ledger system. They work the way the retailers work today: flexible, nimble and scalable.
No longer does a retailer have to build its market strategy around its technology’s limitations; rather, the finance system strategically supports whatever the retailer needs to do to grow the business.
Peter Witham (photo left)
We hear a lot about cloud computing these days. What is the state of cloud in the retail industry?
Peter Witham: One of the hottest topics right now in retail is cloud computing as it is transforming the technology landscape. According to IDC, by 2016 cloud services will become “an everyday sourcing option for the CIO and LOB manager alike, forcing change on both the infrastructure vendors, the owners of business IP and the consumers of cloud services and technologies.”
Scalability, speed and data availability are three of the main advantages of cloud computing – all important to a retailer. Scalability allows a retailer to allocate IT resources to priorities quickly and easily, and the retailer’s software remains current and full of the latest features. The cloud can grow as a retailer’s needs grow, allowing the retailer to maximize limited resources and dollars.
By speed I mean the ability to get set up and in use by employees faster than a more traditional deployment option. Who doesn’t want to give their employees the tools they need as quickly as possible? Data availability means your information is available in real-time to your employees, wherever they are.
How can cloud computing be deployed?
Peter Witham: Cloud is being used at the front-end as well as the back-end but in different ways. For example, some of the larger retailers keep the majority of their IT on premise. For others, the cloud is a way for them to bring their technology current quickly and get back to business. Still others are in between – a hybrid approach consisting of part-on-premise and part-cloud. We recommend that retailers look for cloud options that put them in the driver’s seat, allowing them to decide and change their ratio of on-premise/ cloud deployments as often as internal and external conditions indicate.
Additionally, we recommend they kick the tires of their proposed cloud solutions, to ensure they are getting full-featured versions of the software, not merely lighter versions that do only the basic tasks. Finally, we urge them to choose vendors that go beyond integration with basic apps such as HR and billing and instead offer open APIs that allow retailers to integrate with whatever apps they have today as well as those they may have tomorrow.
Can cloud financial systems accommodate both retail accounting and cost accounting methods?
Peter Witham: Systems such as CODA Financials can. That’s a particularly important option when a retailer acquires a new brand in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world that may use different accounting methods, for example. Retailers need to speedily report data in multiple formats very easily – according to the way the parent company, the U.S. government, or individual countries require it.
Additionally, retailers will want to analyze details, such as profitability, no matter which accounting method is used, so that they can better understand the true cost of running a particular line or going through a particular channel in a certain state, region or country. This is important data for decision-making around such marketing strategies as dynamic pricing, supply and demand and profitability. All these things gathered in real-time can give the retailer key insight to determine how to counter or pre-empt a competitor’s actions.
What’s next for UNIT4 Business Software in retail?
Peter Witham: With a 30-year history of working with some of the world’s leading retail brands, UNIT4 Business Software “gets” retail. We have found that best-in-class retailers want best-in-class technology solutions that enable them to make changes quickly, provide a single view of the truth and work the way they work.
Cloud enables that vision quickly and equips them to adapt to whatever lies ahead, not only in the upcoming shopping season but also well beyond into the future. We will be there to help them navigate change, wherever it takes them. You can learn more about UNIT4 Business Software in the retail industry as well as download a free brochure about the company’s approach to cloud computing here: http://bit.ly/11z1uSc.
What’s next for Peter Witham in retail?
Peter Witham: We have a great group of retail customers and many more coming our way, so I am more than happy to team with them to help them realize their bottom-line goals as quickly as possible.
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Peter Witham is Director and Retail Lead for UNIT4 Business Software, the North American subsidiary of UNIT4, a $624 million global business software and services company that creates, provides and supports software for Businesses Living IN Change – delivered via the cloud and on-premise. UNIT4 Coda Financials cloud deployment for retailers is offered on UNIT4’s own robust and proven infrastructure from several locations throughout the world, as well as through the company’s new membership in the Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Partner Network (APN). For more information, please contact: author@unit4software.com.
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