The customer is king, they have always been king, but today they're a bigger king than
they were before. Retailing used to be a lot easier, you bought stuff, you opened stores
and you sold it. Now all of a sudden consumers have access to the internet, have access to
anything that they could possible want, anyway that they want it. Whether its on a phone,
whether its on an ipad, whether its on a laptop, anyway. And so now, retailers need to understand
that they need to serve that customer anyway that they want to be served, and that's a
challenge for any retailer to be able to give that same level of experience, that same level
of quality to that consumer, anyway that consumer wants it. They don't understand the fact that
a consumer can buy their product at any place, at any time, price their product in their
stores, either buy it from them or somebody else, then that retailer is going to be out
of business. Its about the customer experience, its about making it seamless, its about making
that brand experience of that retailer consistent across all of the different channels and doing
it in a way that satisfies the customers. That is incredibly hard to do. The consumer is
now more aware than ever of where the product is being made, especially the new consumer,
the consumer that is used to getting a real time stream of information via the internet,
via those mobile devices. So the consumer is going to drive this. If a brand is involved
with a disaster, the young consumers are going to shy away from that brand. So brands all
around the world have to realize that this is the future. The young consumer, which is
going to be the only consumer in ten years, really gets this and they have visibility
to whats happening. So you cant hide from this problem, you have to fix it. Cloud technology
is really key to solving the omnichannel challenge. With cloud technology you have complete visibility
into all of your supply chain. And one of the really big challenges in omnichannel is
being able to get that visibility to what do I have in process at the factory? What
do I have in transit? What do I have in a warehouse? What do I have in the store? That
visibility to where everything is gives you the flexibility to be able to ship from whatever
location you need to ship from. So if a consumer wants to shop in the store and buy something
and then have stuff shipped home, or shop at home and come to the store to pick it up?
without good visibility you can't do that. Because you don't know where the inventory is.