Issues like slow-moving check-out lines, missed selling opportunities, poor customer service, along with store associates lacking up-to-date information about product features or availability, are contributing to lost revenue and are keeping retailers up at night. In addition, retailers are also struggling with how to make best use of outdated software systems and bulky handheld mobile options.

The consumer services industry is changing fast and becoming a lot more competitive. Rapid technology changes combined with a hyper connected and evolving consumer, means that organizations need to be able to respond to these changes fast, and ensure a more dynamic decision making process. An effective supply chain strategy will be imperative to not only address market challenges but also proactively meet fluctuations within the demand and supply chain. At HCL, we understand these challenges and the risks and provide solutions that enable Retail organizations to accelerate revenues and profits.

Retailers are in the process of building mobile applications, seeing an opportunity to enable one-to-one marketing and improve customer experience. Retail supply chains have become increasingly global and complex, presenting greater challenges in managing supply and demand. New customers and distribution channels have developed, enhanced by technological innovations and geographical expansion. Existing channels are under pressure and require constant change to retain market position. Retailers have long used mobile devices for inventory purposes, but now they are racing to catch up with their customers’ broad use of mobility.

Heavy rotating equipment like compressors, turbines and pumps are more susceptible to mechanical failure than non-rotating equipment. Periodic health monitoring of rotating equipment is necessary to ensure productivity and to extend longevity. Remote health monitoring of rotating equipment by harnessing cloud computing can appreciably reduce the cost. In fact, it offers a dual benefit – remote monitoring compared to monitoring by qualified staff on-premise, and second, use of the cloud to reduce IT overhead. This article describes the benefits to end users of using cloud for remote monitoring of their assets.

In today’s competitive scenario of commoditization of products and services, technology is no longer a differentiator. During these times of unprecedented change, the characteristic and capability that matter most is the ability to extract value from the business drivers. Revenue, flexibility, speed, efficiency and cost are these fundamental drivers that drive the enterprise and its supply chain. Capturing KPIs and benchmarking is an improvement technique that considers how others perform a similar activity, task, process or function. Continuous health check up of the enterprise supply chain through Key Performance Indicators (KPI) measurement, as well as its comparison against benchmark values can identify the specific business driver from which value can be extracted. HCL’s platform-independent KPI Benchmarking Tool, TOUCHSTONE is a unique proposition for continuous measurement of supply chain KPIs, its comparison against benchmark values and identification of the areas of improvement and the business driver.

Cloud adoption promises to be an interesting journey for an enterprise with its luring benefits of on-demand models enabling faster innovation cycles. However CIOs are concerned whether existing ITIL based governance will be sufficient. These concerns have their foundation in availability, security, regulatory, compliance, data confidentiality, integrity, portability and a host of other issues that have come to center-stage with the introduction of cloud. While ITIL remains well suited to manage IT services, here we discuss the need for assessing and updating the existing processes, some more than others, to remain relevant and current with changing face of IT service delivery.