Overview
To stay ahead of the competition and succeed in today’s economic environment, retailers need to focus on operational efficiency and at the same time seize opportunities for profitable differentiation. One area where you can find real benefit both from a risk reduction and cost perspective is in improving application development, management and maintenance. With a proven approach to application development and management through a long history in working with leading retailers, IBM can help your business increase competitiveness and reduce business and IT risk.
IBM Application Services provides solutions so that you can effectively integrate business and technology, unlocking hidden business value and providing the necessary infrastructure and tools to meet strategic objectives. IBM provides end-to-end solutions, including application design, development, implementation, integration and management services as well as financing support that helps lower up-front investment.
Effective application planning and portfolio management can help your company achieve a number of business objectives, including:
Achievement of Operational Excellence
In the retail industry, continuous pressure on margins forces companies to ensure that distribution costs are tightly controlled, losses through wastage and shrinkage are minimized and IT costs are contained. These are only some of the issues an effective applications strategy can help improve. IBM can help to:
Lower the cost of application management to fund future projects.
Improve testing and management processes across the entire application lifecycle to help mitigate wasted internal resources and improve inventory management.
Automate testing to improve the overall return on application investment.
Improve merchandising and supply chain effectiveness
A long time priority for retailers, supply chain management continues to increase in complexity due to technology advances and heightened consumer and regulatory demand.
An effective applications strategy can help retailers:
Improve the ability to infuse deep customer insight into merchandising and supply chain decision-making.
Simplify your application portfolio to address increasing complexity of supply chains.
Drive new global sourcing capabilities and support flexible fulfillment options.
Deepen customer insight
Retailers are investing great effort and money into systems to gain a better insight into the influences on, and buying behaviors of their customers at both a general and individual level. Customer insight can also be gained by optimizing current applications and effectively managing the portfolio. IBM Application Services can help to:
Ensure that applications support an organization’s ability to develop and utilize a single view of the customer in order to improve the overall shopping experience.
Integrate the application portfolio so that information can be accessed and delivered real-time.
Why IBM
IBM's industry expertise and global investment in technology skills provide a foundation for leadership in application design, development, implementation, integration and management. Our in-depth understanding of business processes and information technology uniquely qualifies us to work with clients who wish to take advantage of industry best practices in application lifecycle management in order for them to focus on their core businesses.
As a leading global provider of consulting, systems integration and application services, IBM has unrivaled experience optimizing application investments and aligning them to business requirements. Our team of more than 90,000 Application Services consultants located around the world can assemble industry and technology expertise and utilize proven methodology, research innovation, and technology accelerators to help you reduce cost and risk while improving business value from applications.
