what we do industries

Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods

What’s going on?

If the retail industry made a shopping list of its own, the staples—good customer service, a pleasant store atmosphere, products that are both in demand and in stock, a reliable transaction system, a solid supply chain—would also be the perishables: quickly out-of-date and perpetually in need of something fresh.

This industry is constantly pummeled by hyperactivity. New products, along with different ways of sourcing, producing, tracking, packaging, marketing, and presenting them, are introduced into the market at breakneck rates: about 25% more per year for the last four years. The driving force behind this kind of innovation? Customers who are increasingly fickle, empowered, demanding, and impatient.

Shopping 3.0 is here, where making a purchase is no longer a means to an end, but a destination activity in itself—one in which the shoppers themselves get to shape their own experiences and even, thanks to the new “crowdsourcing,” their own products. What this means is that good enough just isn’t anymore. Retailers are under pressure to raise the bar every year while their backlog on old projects continues to swell.

How can Clarity help?

To the world’s sellers of goods—whether fast moving, durable, wearable or ingestible—and the companies who manufacture or market them, Clarity brings the professionals and the skills to solve industry-specific problems like the following:

Managing inventory levels while accommodating new products

Your issue: The need to reduce inventory levels—and achieve a significant return on your investment in advanced supply chain, sales, and operations planning tools—while focusing on product line improvements and decreasing out-of-stocks.

Our answer:

Supply chain and enterprise resource planning (ERP) expertise that not only powers up your operations to meet the challenges of SKU proliferation, but that gets you visibility into those operations all the way through to the global partnerships therein.

This kind of visibility amounts to more than just information—it also means using that information to match your forecasts with demand, and to make contingency plans for those times when your forecast misses demand.

Learn about Clarity’s ERP skills.

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A widely distributed technology landscape that challenges maintenance and obstructs new value opportunities

Your issue: The chronic tension among three opposing forces: your IT department’s mandate to support existing systems; its mission to deliver new value to your business; and your slowing IT budget. Plus, underlying these forces is a technology environment that includes proprietary and commercial applications with point-to-point and middleware integration layers, current and previous generational platforms, and fixed architectures.

Our answer:

Application development solutions that have been aggressively field tested in the retail industry, coupled with flexible architecture planning and design.

Clarity elevates application development to the strategic business process that it rightfully is, meaning that whether your shop uses best-of-breed systems or pre-integrated suites, we can alleviate your maintenance burden while helping you achieve the functionality you need to compete. This functionality may include anything from enhanced business intelligence to integrated multi-channel operations to more self-service options for customers.

We can also help you explore and implement modern data, technology, and process architectures that loosely couple the applications in your portfolio, enabling you to deliver new applications quickly and support them more cheaply once they are up and running.

Learn about Clarity’s specific application development skills as well as our Application Development and Information Management Practices.

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Customer centricity that requires localized assortments

Your issue: Budgetary pressure to optimize price and better target promotions, combined with consumer pressure to do so locally as well as the movement toward product assortments that are geographically unique and fluid.

Our answer:

Merchandising solutions that follow two steps: first, identifying consumer preferences and behaviors using a variety of data (from inventory databases to in-store POS systems to social networking sites); and second, aligning that information to an abundant and granular level of product, promotion, store, and retailer attributes, yielding an optimized price/product mix.

Clarity’s retail technology skills, along with its domain expertise in this area, helps combine the art of merchandising with the science of information management, and also helps mend the historically fractured approach to merchandise planning vs. store execution.

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An e-commerce channel in which reliability is a given and remarkability is a must

Your issue: The enormously tall order of an e-commerce channel that 1) gets the back-end, including inventory accuracy and availability to promise, utterly right; and 2) surprises and delights online visitors in a way that captures their attention; encourages them to linger; and ultimately increases the value per transaction.

Our answer:

An Internet presence and shopping platform that offers customers:

  • Advanced search and navigation so that they can better find your products.
  • Rich media so that they can better experience your products.
  • Straightforward and friendly shopping tools so that they can buy your products without hassle.
  • Interactive and social features so that they can talk about the whole experience in an environment that you can monitor, because they are already having Web-enabled, available-to-the-masses conversations anyway.

Learn about Clarity’s specific e-commerce development skills.

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Negotiating a shopping cycle that’s often interrupted, unpredictable, and dispersed

Your issue: The shopping cycle is now distributed to varying degrees: customers research your products online—often using your own e-commerce site—and then buy in your brick-and-mortar stores, or they browse in your physical store and then look for a better price online, or they go straight to your suppliers or distributors for the best deal.

Our answer:

Though you’re already multi-channel—perhaps with a high-performing e-commerce site to prove it—Clarity can upgrade you from multi to merged channels so that your customers really do have a seamless experience.

This doesn’t mean setting prices on individual channels and then juggling inventory when you need to. Rather, it means using optimization engines to guide demand wherever you want it to go.

Learn about Clarity’s specific system integration skills.

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