5 Ways to Leverage Product Information to Grow Sales
Retailers today face an intensely competitive marketplace with unprecedented challenges and opportunities. With the emergence of a greater variety of channels, an abundance of product options and easily accessible online price comparisons, consumers now demand better service and lower prices. The ability to ensure that the right product is available at the right place and at the right time is critical. Organizations that can react faster tend to come out on top.
As more and more companies begin to operate 24/7 through a growing number of sales channels, the volume of strategic business information grows exponentially in both size and complexity. This, in turn, increases the difficulty of successfully managing product, supplier and consumer information as this influx of strategic information must be proactively managed as it flows across organizational channels. In fact, the ability to leverage operational knowledge as a performance success tool is key to increasing business profitability, mitigating risks, enhancing agility and enabling better decision making.
Unfortunately, operational information is typically siloed in many organizations. It resides and evolves independently in multiple applications, sales solutions and spreadsheets where it cannot flow efficiently. Worse yet, an alarming number of critical business decisions are based on information that's most often inaccurate or incomplete.
Traditional Efforts to Combat the Challenge: What C-Level Execs Need to Know
Previously, IT professionals would turn to their ERP system vendors in hopes of a quick, cost-effective solution to manage the increased volume of data. However, what they soon discovered was that the major ERP suite vendors lack the ability to manage every business unit's strategic information as it flows across both internal and external channels. In order to emerge stronger and prepared when the economy recovers, senior executives must take an immediate, direct approach to solve their multichannel strategic information challenges.
Retailers have come to realize that to strategically manage their information assets they need a combination of technology and an organized philosophy and process. This new strategy must have a strong focus on using a full-cycle approach to integrating business units, vendors, product information and other critical information assets into one repository. Strategic information management doesn't represent an incremental change in function or process; it's a much more comprehensive and integrated approach to managing operational information as it flows through the business.
As today's retail environment becomes increasingly challenging, brands are looking to strategic information management technology and processes in order to drive value-added initiatives, including the following five: