Unified Business Environment

Retail is Detail. Now more than ever, retail industry is facing intensive competition, wafer thin margins and minimal revenue growth. It is process intensive and requires management and manipulation of an enormous amount of information. It is a very knowledge intensive industry where unfortunately, business knowledge is lost with the departure of staff members. Current legacy systems and stand-alone function specific packages implemented over the last few decades have proven insufficient for the challenge. In order for these stand-alone applications to perform, information and data from other applications are either fed in through file transfer or manual key-in. Inadequate patchwork solutions have resulted in information silos, a duplication of work efforts, inaccessibility and loss of data and knowledge, poor communication between business partners and a lack of analytical tools.

This point-to-point integration approach has resulted in a "rats nest" which is difficult and expensive to maintain and expand.

Let's not forget that most retail enterprises have operations over dispersed geographical areas. In this industry where competition is so intense and in a time where globalization is moving at cut-throat speed, there is constant need for retail companies to re-organize and expand their operations domestically and across natioanl borders.

Businesses must find a way to streamline processes, allow for more effective data flow, provide meaningful analytical tools to move ahead of the competition and position them for rapid and efficient expansion and re-organization plan.