Retail orchestration hub

Meet Sarah, a retail store manager in charge of the store's finances, operations and shopping experience. See how she uses IBM Cloud® Paks to increase sales and keep customers happy.

1. Deliver profits

With the current system, Sarah is hampered by the lack of unconnected but interdependent data sets. Having no real-time visibility of store performance prevents her from quickly making improvements that could deliver additional cash flow.

IBM Cloud Paks give Sarah an AI-driven control tower through which she can access multiple data sources, providing her with the insights she needs to make better decisions and improve store performance. With IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation, Sarah can create intelligent workflows to automate and orchestrate store processes using multiple applications, increasing sales and operational profitability with better store execution.

2. Optimize operations

Sarah is responsible for successfully managing operations across every channel — digital and physical. She finds it challenging to balance customer service, inventory management, e-commerce order fulfillment, transactions, risk and loss prevention, maintenance and much more.

To optimize operations, Sarah needed to bring together hybrid cloud technologies that seamlessly orchestrate the dynamics of the modern retail store. Using IBM Cloud Pak® for Data and IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration, Sarah is able to re-invent her operating model so that people, process and technology are fully aligned, and both existing and new systems can work in harmony as a unified platform.

3. Make customers happy

Without insights that provide better clarity for merchandise planning and customer demands, Sarah finds it difficult to properly forecast and meet customer needs.

To optimize operations, Sarah needed to bring together hybrid cloud technologies that seamlessly orchestrate the dynamics of the modern retail store. Using IBM Cloud Pak for Data and IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, Sarah is able to re-invent her operating model so that people, process and technology are fully aligned, and both existing and new systems can work in harmony as a unified platform.

Meet Arthur, the chief data officer of a large retail corporation with multiple store locations. Explore how he derives insights from IBM Cloud Paks® to drive a more effective digital business.

1. Improve marketing and targeting

With the lack of real-time data sets, Arthur has limited visibility into strategic aspects of the business, preventing him from making solid data-driven decisions for the company.

Using IBM Cloud Pak® for Data, Arthur is able to access greater insights to improve the organization's digital business performance, especially in program marketing and targeting. This also allows him to transform and improve the digital connection with customers, increasing digital sales and operational profit as a result. IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration enables real-time operational data synchronization between his ecosystems' applications.

2. Get visibility across stores

With data transparency sorely lacking, Arthur finds it hard to optimize asset utilization. This means he is unable to ensure inventory and assets are in the right spot to allow store managers to maximize their return on capital.

Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data collects and organizes information the managers need for better store planning and execution. When customer data isn't spread across the enterprise in silos, Arthur can spend less time hunting for insights and managing non-value-add activities. IBM Cloud Pak for Integration helps to integrate critical systems across the ecosystem, giving Arthur better visibility and allowing him to put his energy toward turning insights into action.

See how CVS Health adopted a modern approach to hybrid cloud integration that included patterns, practices, specialized skills and technology to reduce integration costs by two thirds.

Meet Audrey, a data scientist. Learn how she leverages AI across varied data sources to get performance metrics and improve retail operating models.

1. Access various data sources

Retail performance is influenced by multiple factors such as promotions, events, weather, on-shelf availability, category financial plans, range and assortment decisions, customer behavior and store operational execution. Audrey has to find a way to capture these data points from disparate sources so the organization can use them to optimize operations.

With Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data, Audrey has access to all the data sources that she needs through a diverse set of connectors that can pull information stored in other systems.

2. Build models quickly

Audrey spends a significant amount of time in manual data exploration to better understand headline retail performance metrics. This involves a lot of data manipulation from multiple systems to identify what is driving performance.

IBM Cloud Pak for Data enables collaboration across the ecosystem and teams are highly productive because they can access their tools of choice. Data stewards can make sensitive data available to data scientists and at the same time define policies that protect customers’ private information. And, IBM Cloud Pak for Integration enables the flow of information from multiple systems for a unified platform capability, enabling Audrey to digitize store processes.

Learn how a team of data scientists at Highmark Health collaborated to build models quickly to predict – and prevent – sepsis mortality.

3. Improve collaboration

Today Audrey works in a silo and shares information with the data engineer and machine learning (ML) teams through spreadsheets. Too much of her time is spent doing manual tasks and not enough on investigating potential changes to improve the retail operating model.

IBM Cloud Pak for Data enables collaboration across the ecosystem and teams are highly productive because they can access their tools of choice. Data stewards can make sensitive data available to data scientists and at the same time define policies that protect customers’ private information. And, IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration enables the flow of information from multiple systems for a unified platform capability, enabling Audrey to digitize store processes.

Meet Bill, the inventory planning manager. See how he uses AI insights and decision optimization from IBM Cloud® Paks to ensure optimal store inventory and reduce cost and waste.

1. Meet customer demand

Today, Bill doesn't have visibility into the data he needs, particularly on customer demand and inventory availability.

Using the AI insights in Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data, Bill is able to make decisions based on external events and information like weather, traffic and trends to optimize complex multi-inventory location moves. This leads to a more optimal supply in response to fluctuating customer demands.

With App Connect enterprise system adapters in IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration, Bill is able to extend the workflows and integrate with supply chain processes to be able to respond more quickly to changes in customer demand.

2. Make data-driven decisions

Bill needs to schedule multi-inventory shifts but has to rely on past experience and gut feelings to make decisions, which are often inaccurate.

With the decision optimization capability of IBM Cloud Pak for Data, Bill can more effectively make data-driven decisions through improved inventory allocations. Bill uses operational and master data stored within the platform, connecting and accessing external data through data virtualization.