Retail

Retail organizations are highly distributed enterprises whose business processes extend from storefronts to headquarters and the supply chain. Point-to-point
batch-style integration of traditional retail IT infrastructure is under increasing stress due to rapid store growth, extended operating hours and wider chain geographic coverage. With pressure from competitors and customers to provide advanced real-time services, retailers need a new way to integrate.

Single-vendor solutions promise fully integrated services, but
wholesale replacement of systems is expensive and disruptive.

Retailers taking a best-of-breed approach to their point solutions need an integration strategy and supporting infrastructure to bridge systems in their distributed enterprise. The strategy must be scalable to handle peak holiday traffic, secure to run on the Internet, and remotely manageable so it is cost-effective to configure and maintain.

Sonic's ESB-based distributed services platform helps retailers to:

• Reduce transaction costs and the time to process each transaction.
• Shorten cycle time and reduce inventories while improving in-stock service levels through real-time integration of supply chain and related applications.
• Allow faster and more intelligent response to conditions like stock outs, suspect transactions, trend information and promotion success.
• Remove data duplication and errors, enabling clearer decision-making based on one version of the truth.
• Reduce IT costs by helping retailers adopt open industry standards.
• Reduce the cost of integration through standards-based tools and rapid out-of-box deployment.

Store Communications and POS Migration
Sonic ESB® connects thousands of stores to headquarters and one another for real-time data exchange using a simple, scalable and reliable architecture across satellites, dial-up and the Internet.

New store systems, which need real-time communications and support for XML data exchange, are ideally served by the enterprise service bus (ESB) for home-office communications. Legacy POS systems may be connected as well, either on the store side or in headquarters. Connected by the ESB, back-end systems that depend on new and legacy POS system data can be isolated from day-by-day changes in the stores as they cut over to the new POS systems. In this way, standards-based integration provides a smooth and rapid migration process.

Large-scale POS upgrades take three to four years to roll out. During that period it is especially difficult to extend the capabilities of legacy POS systems, though there is often great business advantage to do so. The enterprise service bus provides the infrastructure needed to retrofit advanced capabilities to stores with older POS systems. This frees the retail organization from "legacy store system freeze" and provides greater flexibility in migration planning and the agility to handle new requirements during the process.

Multi-channel Retailing
Website sales are typically equivalent to that of 6 stores. However, the benefit of the website is far greater when integrated with store systems. Customers who shop in more than one channel are big spenders, and are worth 3-6 times as much as customers who visit the store only. This insight has greatly increased the value of the website to a retail business, but it also increases the stakes of attracting and retaining valuable multi-channel shoppers.

The multi-channel customer gets a holistic experience: visit the website, see if the price is acceptable, check availability in the store, reserve the item, and know it will be there when they stop by after work. This requires the ability to look at store inventory and actually tell someone in the store to take it off the shelf and hold it at the customer service desk. If the website takes a payment or deposit to provide this service, the store also needs to know whether and how much was paid so the customer is charged the correct amount.

Multi-channel retailing requires a great deal of systems integration to truly work. From locating and reserving inventory to taking web order returns in the store, Sonic ESB® provides retailers the distributed services infrastructure needed for real-time deployment, with the flexibility to link up myriad systems already in service.

Standards-based Supply Chain Integration
Through lower inventory carry costs, better in-stock performance and fewer markdowns, retailers everywhere know that taking days out of the supply chain cycle time returns millions to the bottom line.

But in practice, there are limits to how far retailers can go with traditional EDI. With little or no in-house EDI-skilled IT personnel, smaller suppliers are not connected. Though they represent a fraction of a retailer's total volume, their lack of automatic data sharing and integration results in a disproportionally high cost of doing business. Sonic ESB's standards-based distibuted services platform makes supply chain collaboration with small suppliers cost-effective and efficient.

RFID Integration
Deployment of RFID systems and integration with existing applications creates challenging demands on IT systems. Architects recognize the need to design integrated systems that will be massively scalable, yet be remotely configurable, manageable and secure across physically distributed sites and corporate walls. However, the EPCglobal standards to support these complex interactions of disparate systems are not yet mature.

Sonic ESB® allows retailers and their suppliers to build a distributed architecture that solves practical RFID integration problems today and can accommodate changing specifications and scalability requirements as EPCglobal standards evolve and deployments expand.