Today, we're excited to welcome a guest writer to our blog. Jose Paredes Hernandez is an accomplished enterprise technology executive at IBM with proven experience delivering results at the highest levels in Fortune 500 corporations. He's an expert in leading comprehensive transformations of GTM and global services organizations. A strategic decision-maker who shapes the culture of organizations, Jose is recognized for building industry-leading teams that deliver world-class results. Welcome to the Syniti blog, Jose!
It’s no secret that current supply chain challenges are impacting the retail and commerce industry and consumers in a major way. Unforeseen disruptions to the supply chain, massive shifts in demand across all categories, and variable product and goods availability have forced everyone to alter their buying habits. As reduced foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores drives brands to consider new ways to deliver and source their products and services, suppliers and retailers are shifting to an increasingly omnichannel order fulfillment and distribution model.
In order to meet consumer expectations and maintain relationships, enterprise retailers today need more visibility in their supply and inventory data. Yet legacy applications lack the real-time collaboration between buyers and sellers required, resulting in lost margins, inaccurate KPI calculations, and excess inventory carrying costs.
Modernizing Inventory and Retail Data Management
Inventory visibility has always been an important part of any retail operation. Accurate, real-time access to supply and inventory information helps to improve customer experience and avoid stock-outs, overstocks, and unaccounted-for shrink situations. But as many operations shift to an omnichannel order fulfillment and distribution model, a more accurate, real-time view into supply chain logistics and inventory data has become critical.
In order to stay agile and create more harmonized, intelligent workflows, retailers and suppliers alike are turning to modern, accessible solutions in data management. Solutions like SAP Customer Activity Repository (CAR) easily transform business processes and system landscapes away from legacy database solutions to a more sophisticated, omnichannel platform that eliminates the overhead of multiple, siloed solutions and complex integrations.
A foundation that collects transactional data in various formats from previously siloed, independent applications, SAP CAR provides a more harmonized, multi-channel transactional data model for downstream applications. Utilizing in-memory data and open APIs, data is readily accessible and consumable for internal and external applications. Modules such as Omnichannel Article Availability (OAA) provides real-time inventory availability that can be leveraged in different omnichannel scenarios, even complex integrations using OTB APIs and microservices.
SAP CAR supports critical retail business processes and inventory management, such as:
- POS Data Transfer & Audit (DTA)
- Muti-channel transaction data management
- Unified demand forecast
- Demand data foundation
- Omni-channel promotion pricing
- Inventory visibility and Omni-channel Article Availability (OAA) and sourcing
- On shelf- availability
- SAP Fiori for SAP Customer Activity Repository
Accelerating SAP Value with Advanced Data Migration
By modernizing sales audit, supply, and inventory management systems, companies can easily scale their management of sales transactions from point-of-sales (POS) or external order management systems. Merchants, category managers, planners, and inventory control teams gain real-time insight into valuable business KPIs such as sales performance, revenue, and accurate gross margin across channels.
Developed in close partnership with IBM and SAP, Syniti’s Advanced Data Migration (ADM) solution enables retail organizations to quickly modernize their sales audit operations, enabling real-time cross-channel inventory visibility, and paving the way for future business transformation initiatives.
Backed by Syniti’s intelligent data migration capabilities, brands can easily migrate to SAP CAR and enable SAP OAA, reducing extraneous data and streamlining operational performance. This fast-paced, 16-week program reduces implementation timeline and risks while optimizing your data verification and transformation efforts. Able to identify things like closed stores, obsolete products, or irrelevant sales channels, Syniti’s ADM solution only migrates what’s needed - so you can start to get the most out of your SAP solution with the right data from the start.