Retailers today need to play multiple roles—innovate, focus on environment, customer service and firefight price. They must find a way to provide a positive and innovative customer experience in order to grow sales and profits, while reducing the percentage of their IT budget that goes to simply support existing IT systems. As fuel prices rise, retailers become more concerned about cost savings in their stores and throughout their supply chains. Not many have been as successful or proactive in either department as Walmart. But with multiple solutions and options available we are not too far from a greener lean retail experience.
A Lean Retail Architecture can help to reduce IT costs in stores and the data center and in return enable savings to improve the customer experience.
A lean architecture opens up various avenues to save cost and energy. In addition businesses can become more agile and deploy and upgrade applications with ease. Key focus of the Lean Retail Architecture is to reduce the operating costs associated with the storage and server technology that can proliferate throughout stores and retail data centers.
Consolidation and virtualisation of applications and servers, decreases operating expenses for administration, maintenance, upgrades, and patches on in-store applications and servers. By consolidating servers through load balancing and using virtualisation to gain greater use of storage, retailers can improve efficiency between 30 percent and 70 percent and extend the life of current IT investments and have lowered energy requirements.
Improving server storage efficiency
Every retailer can reassess the status of its current store applications, given the capabilities of the Lean Retail Architecture, to provide reliable, secure LAN-like performance over the WAN and get greater efficiency from existing data center assets. Data-center–based applications deployed to the stores can have their performance accelerated to LAN-like speeds, in conjunction with load-balanced servers that use virtual storage. Improving the efficiency of servers and storage helps reduce costs and improve performance at the store, the server farm, and the storage area network.
This translates into faster access to information by store staff thereby increasing consumer experience and brand loyalty. If a customer leaves the store without buying because lines are too long or assistance by store associates is not available, that affects store performance. Delayed service is equivalent to lost sale. Equipping the staff with easy and faster access to time critical data is improved productivity leading to increased revenue and profit.
Centralised Architecture
Another important aspect is the response time to integration and new applications. As retailers expand and promise seamless experience to its customers regardless of location it is vital that IT be able to deploy new applications and capabilities quickly and effectively. The Lean Retail Architecture enables more applications to be deployed centrally, decreasing the time and cost of deployment.
A centralised system also reduces the costs of opening new stores and of integrating acquisitions. It also enables simultaneous patches and upgrades of applications in all stores, thereby eliminating the need to dispatch technicians to each store. Another important benefit is the huge savings on power and energy consumption.
Achieving a Lean Retail Architecture includes the following steps:
• Redeploy servers and applications from the stores to the data center
• Consolidate and virtualize data center storage and servers
• Make application availability a focus of a network-centric architecture
• Move to a network-based, on-demand services model to deliver applications, security, mobility, and voice capabilities
Energy management
There are issues surrounding the supply chain, water management, building materials, alternative power source but right now, energy management of the equipment retailers have in their stores, distribution centers and data centers offers the most cost savings.
Lighting and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) – are the biggest energy consumers for any retail, and can consume upwards of 70-80% of a store or DC’s energy costs. They also have smaller sources of energy such as computers, refrigeration units, trash compactors and the likes. There have been solutions that claim to improve a retailer’s energy management costs by 10-20%, which haven’t necessarily been feasible numbers – particularly since some retailers have an HVAC system that is more than 30 years old. Retailers need to pilot these solutions and see how their old systems can be integrated into the new processes. But today retailers are worried about survival, not necessarily their energy consumption. A down economy is certainly where leaders make moves for success down the line.
Future Choice
The uncertainties of the market and changing consumer tastes will always keep retailers looking for ways to do more with less. A Lean Retail Architecture provides consistent and ongoing cost savings in stores and the data center. At the same time, by enabling easier deployment of new applications and capabilities, it helps businesses to innovate and respond to competitive innovation.
By: Biztech2 Staff
Source: http://biztech2.in.com
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