As the volume of structured and unstructured data across your enterprise landscape continues to explode, ensuring real-time access to high-quality master data for your various stakeholders will be crucial. A failure to do so will hinder your ability to reduce time-to-market, shorten product development lifecycles, rationalize capital and operating expenditures, and manage supply chain complexity. Therefore, it is important for you to put master in place data management processes covering data governance, business process governance, and monitoring procedures.

Fog Computing is a horizontal capability that complements both cloud and edge computing. The theme is generally directed at tapping into services accessible from devices, such as payments, increasing personalized offers and retaining customers who are lured by non-traditional banking services (such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay etc.

Jennie is buying her monthly groceries online. She checks out a pack of organic cereals, really likes one, but it falls a bit outside her budget. She decides she doesn’t really need it. The next day, while on her way to office, she passes by a store that has the same cereal box. She gets a notification on her smartphone, telling her the item is available at a discount. Voila! Jennie grabs the chance, and buys the box right there.

Inventory is the most significant investment across every industry, more so for the retail sector. In order to maximize the Return on Investment (ROI), each and every retailer must ensure that exuberant inventory investments are kept to the minimum. Statistics confirm that up to 30-35% of the total inventory is stuck in the non-performing, slow moving Stock-keeping units (SKUs), whose cumulative contribution to sales is less than 5%. This phenomenon is known as the long tail of the supply chain. The entire phenomenon of inventory in retail sector is dependent upon the customer. Market is volatile hence inventory optimization calls for immediate action at retailer’s end. Some ways to reduce unnecessary inventory investments is to optimize the assortment, based on one or more parameters such as, No. of SKU’s (#SKU) sales, Gross Margins Return on Investment (GMROI), Space Productivity, Minimum Presentation and so on, the non-performing SKUs may be selected and rationalized appropriately. “SKU Rationalization is an important technique in inventory management that helps retailers optimize their assortments by decommissioning some of the non- productive merchandise.”