The ability to conveniently access the internet via a smart phone, tablet or other device, is something that has become increasingly important to all of us. The pressure is on for businesses to make the face to face experience and the online experience a completely seamless transition for the consumer. In a recent post to this blog, Transforming IT for the New Era of Retailing, we were introduced to the IT infrastructure challenges retailers face in order to meet consumer expectations. Note that retailers aren’t the only ones feeling the stress. Suppliers and fashion design companies behind the retailers also experience very similar challenges. Smarter Computing solutions help alleviate these pain points by providing a more flexible environment to manage data needs.
Let’s take a look at a real life example.
Bernard Chaus is a fashion design company based in New York, NY that manages sales, marketing, design and production for its brands, with fashion collections available in a wide range of department stores including Macy’s, Nordstrom and Neiman-Marcus.
Their challenge, Bernard Chaus needed to improve the way they consolidated the sales data received from its large base of retailers. They also needed to come up with a better way to analyze and make sense of this data to produce meaningful business insights, and allow the company to make timely decisions.
“Each retailer would send us a sales report, but the data would be in different formats. It was impossible to pull all of the information together.”
Henry Thervil, President of Sales for the Vince Camuto brand, Bernard Chaus
Working with IBM and IBM Premier Business Partner, Sky I.T. Group, Bernard Chaus implemented a unique, cloud-based solution with business analytics capabilities.
Their Smarter Computing solution helped the company to:
- Improve sales visibility and decision making
- Boost retail sales and reduce product markdowns
- Improve productivity with an easy-to-use dashboard interface
- Take advantage of the solution’s powerful, built-in analytics
“The sheer fact that we have IBM hardware and software with SKYPAD has given us the analytics capabilities to gain a big advantage over our competitors.”
Henry Thervil, President of Sales for the Vince Camuto brand, Bernard Chaus
Check out the Bernard Chaus IBM Case Study to learn more on how Bernard Chaus is using a cloud-based solution backed by IBM to improve retail visibility and decision making.
For more on Smarter Computing in retail, check out my related Smarter Computing in Action post: Dillard’s Smarter Computing approach to Business Intelligence.
To view all Smarter Computing client success stories in retail, click here.
To effectively compete in today’s changing world, it is essential that companies leverage innovative technology to differentiate from competitors. Learn how you can do that and more in the Smarter Computing Analyst Paper from Hurwitz and Associates.
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