Think Flat

by "Radha" Anantha Radhakrishnan, AVP, Infosys Retail and CPG Business Unit

I have always been fascinated by the power, largeness and might of an elephant and wondered many a time how this power could be unleashed many folds, if it can be more agile and made to dance, while retaining its might and majesty.

Having worked in the Retail and CPG industry on the business side as well as consulting side over the last many years, I have had the opportunity to see the sheer magnitude of effort, energy and time which goes into collecting and investing in information across the many different players in the whole value chain.

There are so many types of data  – sales, inventory, consumer, shopper, price, promotion, deals, orders, forecasts, service levels etc – adding up to billions of terabytes of data.

These billions of terabytes and the investments made to continuously collect them form the retail industry "information elephant”.

In the increasingly flat world marked by palpable emergence of new types of consumers (Prosumers, Transumers, Millennials et al), multiple new channels, new store formats, increased competition along with emerging new geo markets (China, India, eastern Europe etc.), each player in the retail value chain needs to figure out the best possible way to make money from the information elephant.

For the information elephant to dance and for the players in the retail value chain to make money from it, there are many opportunities and challenges.  Surprisingly, none of the big ones have to do with technology. They have to do with changing mindsets to think “flat world”:  Think enterprise, think actionable insights, POR (Point Of Relevance) instead of POS (Point of Sale). 
 
They have to do with thinking about “information turns” just as retailers are used to thinking about inventory turns.

• How well is the data collected been used meaningfully across functional silos within the enterprise and leveraged across the value chain?
• Is this data converted to information, knowledge and actionable insights?
• Is the actionable insight made available to the appropriate people at the “Point of Relevance” (POR) to be able to decide?
• Is the company’s focus on information storage rather then “information turns”?

In the flat world with dispersed and diversified value chains on the one side, leading to decreasing economies of scope and scale, and on the other side a consumer base which is increasingly stating that One Size, Color, Shape, Taste will not Fit All –- the players who can make their information elephant dance are going to be the winners.

Everyone who matters in the value chain has built its own information elephant, painstakingly at that. The time has come to make that elephant dance and increase the information turns –- It is the only way to succeed in a flattening world.