As and when retailers emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is almost guaranteed that the retail storefront pullback will only accelerate. However, this push will increasingly drive retailers to design and deploy more efficient in-store systems. Systems that rely on Cloud and DevOps. So what does the endstate look like and what are the key performance indicators (KPI) for industry-leading store deployments?
The Seven KPIs
In previous blogs, we have discussed how millennials, as well as internal business audiences, are demanding specialized capabilities of Retail IT. However, the vast majority of traditional Retail IT is still legacy based. Retailers that pursue new capabilities and invest wisely can still return to a growth mode in the years to come.
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I present the seven core KPIs for Retail IT to measure and benchmark.
- Ease and flexibility of deployments covered – support for running VMs/Containers or a mix at the store locations using a logical management plane. The plane supports provisioning of applications to edge devices anywhere – whether on-premise or to SaaS hosted in the cloud
- Reliable and secure communications layer between management plane and edge devices
- Enable 100% remote troubleshooting and auto-upgrades / updates to edge nodes
- Reduced time to deploy each node as well as applications to each node across 1000s of edge devices
- Massive scale – 10,000+ store servers/devices
- Flexibility of tenancy – Support multitenancy at Corporate, Region and Store level
- Enable Limited resource footprint both per store server and management plane
Conclusion
Store IT in its core form is no different from edge computing. While the need is to improve brand perception as well as sales per customer as well as customer experience, smart store systems can make a world of difference.