Back Office moves up Retail IT agenda
Whether focusing on security, customer service, processes or management, retailers increasingly want tight integration between the different elements of there technology infrastructure so that they have a transparent view of what's happening across the business at any given time and can address any IT-related system issues that may cause disruption to operations or hinder effective business execution.
Dan Hansen, retail sales manager at Retail Technology's Back Office special supplement sponsor and business management software provider, COA solutions (COA) said: "Retailers are beginning to focus on the back office to deliver greater insight into the business. It's about pulling together the relationships between sales, people and system, in functions like finance, to get better process integration, manage costs and increase productivity. Additionally, systems integration efforts are being focused around establishing a common architecture to effectively glue systems together and support a modular approach to business systems where returns are required in ever decreasing time frames."
"For example, the COA Smart Business Suite for retailers allows them to manage core assets and establish key performance indicators. I also find retailers prefer it if, like us, the vendor comes from a business functionality background than a pure technology one. These kinds of vendors make it easier to fit systems around the functionality retailers actually need."
Alessandra Tonchia, founder of multi-channel software provider Finantix said: "We are seeing that a mix of both back office replacement and a move towards service oriented architecture (SOA) go together under the umbrella of infrastructure refreshment in medium and large retail financial institutions."
"The larger the institution, the more likely they are to recognize the SOA is an independent enabler that new back office (and front office) applications can leverage, allowing the institution to migrate both back and front office applications independently. Smaller institutions also benefit from this approach, though are more likely to choose back office applications that deliver limited front ends, due to the overhead of maintaining an independent SOA."
"The ideal scenario is process-oriented flexibility in the front office, via SOA enabled front office solutions, and stability in the back office systems, without the demand to update more frequently than is necessary."
Paul Makin, Sales Director at Microsoft-based provider K3 said: "A lot of companies historically wrote complex integrations between their back-office systems. But then they end up with multiple versions of the truth."
"The whole integration piece has become much more important to retailers and the functionality in platform-based systems like SAP and Microsoft Dynamics is increasingly allowing them to consolidate back-office applications."
Karen Dyke, Triangle Business Development Director told Retail Technology retailers are most challenged in two specific areas when it comes to purely horizontal back-office processes: Human resources (HR) and payroll, as well as finance.
"Reporting down to store level or lower demands very different functionality than standard reporting functions. Time and attendance, for example, is major very different challenge for retailers."
"It's all about choosing the right tool for the right job. For instance, document management solutions can be written in .NET while calculating complex rosters involved in labour management is better suited to the Java development environment."
Rob Cornley, head of client care at BT Expedite took a more process-centric, than technologyled view.
He said: "One means of providing better levels of control across the retail IT estate is through the use of information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes. ITIL is an industry recognized framework for managing IT systems that ensures best practice in IT services management. The overriding concept is to have a single service measure for all of the elements within the provision of any IT service. If there are five elements of a system that can cause service failure then there must first be a single measure that can be applied to either restore service or ensure the service is delivered to an agreed level. Whilst many industries adopt certain elements of the framework and gain benefits in terms of service improvement, internal efficiencies and focus for the organization, many do not and as a result can suffer from unplanned service interruption, capacity and availability shortfalls."
October 2007
