Glen Margolis, chief executive officer of Steelwedge, shows how an understanding of the "agility gap" can help companies to cope with uncertainty in markets.
JDA Software Group Inc. has released JDA Customer Engagement Cloud, an application that supports multichannel retail commerce and optimization logic in real time.
Back in the fall, Macy's spokesman Jim Sluzewski said his company would consider further expansion of its ship-from-store initiatives after it evaluates its 2012 holiday sales figures. The chain already expanded the project to more than 290 stores before the holiday season began.
Tokyo-based retailer BEAMS Co. Ltd. has incorporated radio frequency identification technology at five B:MING Life Stores that it recently opened in Japan. The stores are employing RFID technology for both tracking inventory and improving efficiency at the point of sale.
Even in today's data-hungry analytics environment, collecting and keeping every tiny granule of retail data - down to the level of each individual transaction and web click - might seem like overkill. But Sears Holdings has discovered that data storage costs have gotten low enough, and analytical tools have grown powerful enough, that this approach to Big Data has shortened the time needed for analytics projects by 60 percent to 70 percent, while also improving promotion conversions, lowering inventory levels and boosting sales.