Industry trends and challenges

The retail industry is facing many challenges in the competitive business environment of the new century. Evolving market forces, from a sluggish economy to increasingly intense competition, are leading retailers to revisit their business models.

Retail companies must focus on reducing costs and minimizing the time required to bring products to market. The need for integration software is growing quickly as companies require management of high volumes of transactions, while attempting to automate and optimize their businesses at the process level. Integration can enable automation of tedious, error-prone tasks, reducing labor and error-tracking costs. Integration across multiple sales channels can improve the customer experience and increase brand loyalty. However, retailers require process integration that is specific to their industry, and in order to implement this integration, different companies must be able to rely on standardized data.

Before retailers can effectively use product data in internal systems such as store operations, order management, warehouse management, logistics management, and merchandising, both supplier and retailer data must be updated and conform with an industry standard. But trading partners typically do not have a systematic feedback mechanism with each other to know when the product data in their respective computer systems is actually correct and synchronized.

The emergence of UCCnet®, a third-party external exchange that provides product registry services enabling synchronized item and location data between trading partners, has brought new opportunities for manufacturers and retailers. UCCnet can facilitate both the exchange of standards-compliant data and end-to-end business process management. The Product Information Management for Retailers solution enables retailers to synchronize their product data both inside and outside of their enterprise.

Parent topic: Solution overview