Business Intelligence (BI)

Going local is the big trend in retail center food and beverage options, so why not for retail brokerage houses?   That’s the tack CBRE is taking in its Seattle office with the hiring of two long-time leasing pros from Washington State-based Wallace Properties, which lays claim to scouting out the best locations from “Olympia to Bellingham and from Seattle to Spokane.”  

A growing supermarket retailer in the Adriatic region has deployed a solution to better manage its disparate inventory levels.   Konzum, part of the 2,000-store Agrokor group with 2,000 stores in the Adriatic region, has been expanding its footprint through accelerated acquisitions have accelerated Konzum’s growth.  But the strategy has created a diversified store network, each with different store layouts and inventories. These issues also force the grocery chain to manage disparate inventory files, and deal with order exceptions.

Adidas Group wants to kick off its expansion in China on the right foot.   The sportswear brand plans to bolster its retail sales network to 12,000 outlets in China by 2020, with much of the growth slated for smaller cities. However, the company also knows that conducting international trade within China can be difficult and complex due to challenges presented by huge import and export volume, and minimal advance notice of regulatory changes.  

Chain Store Age will sponsor a Webinar on one of the most important issues facing store retailers: How to connect emerging solutions and technology disruptors — and take advantage of rich data sets filtering through these systems — to meet new demands across retail operations and the customer experience.     

Jos. A. Banks hopes to better connect with its shoppers during online searches by “speaking their language.”   In its quest to create a more inspiring online experience, especially one that could would make product searches more consistent and relevant, Jos. A. Banks is taking steps to improve its product descriptions. The retailer began this journey by adding the Edgecase Product Intelligence Platform, a solution that helped create more than 60,000 new product values, or attributes, to define online merchandise. 

A move to a more fast-fashion model helped Francesca’s to outperform many of its peers in the fourth quarter, with sales and income that topped expectations.       The retailer reported better-than-expected profit of $14.6 million, or 39 cents a share, for the quarter ended January 28, compared to $14.7 million profit, or 35 cents a share, in the year ago period.  

Online reviews have boomed in recent years. Once just another step in the customer decision-making process, they are now a pervasive part of daily life.  

eBay is preparing to connect with each of its individual consumers — starting from the first minute they visit the site.   The company plans to do so with a new homepage that is “designed to inspire and engage with relevant, personalized content and highlighted deals,” according to the company.  

As the retail experience becomes increasingly digitally-influenced, retailers need a flexible point-of-sale (POS) system that can deliver a consistent brand experience at store level.    Nordstrom is taking steps to make this happen through a partnership with Infor to run POS in the cloud. Having a POS system in the cloud will give Nordstrom the tools to be more accurate and consistent across multiple locations, attend to customers more quickly, and better manage and track information, according to Infor.   

Time-starved shoppers expect their favorite grocers to have the staples they need when they enter the store — and supermarkets are hard-pressed to deliver.