Modernizing your organization

Article
12/01/2022

Building innovative practices by using data to create guided customer solutions allows you to better engage customers based on their needs. Unlocking insights into customer needs with innovative disciplines like democratizing data and innovative application development, widens efficiencies in how data is stored, analyzed, managed, and governed. Enable the move to Intelligent retail maturity by fully modernizing your organization with SaaS apps and service. Quickly and reliably provision SaaS solutions that lever AI and ML services to deliver customer insights that maximize your business value.

Innovation in the retail industry

Cloud-centered innovation can provide the greatest business value for your retail organization. You can unlock new technical skills and expanded business capabilities with innovation focused on cloud adoption. Predictively increasing your organization's business value will require understanding your customers' needs, and rapidly building innovations that shape how they interact with your products and services.

We recommend first starting with customer adoption to generate necessary feedback—building customer partnerships through the build-measure-learn feedback loop. Keeping customer empathy in mind, look at ways of developing digital inventions that advance adoption—technological innovations that solve your customers' needs and provide innovative solutions.

Predictively moving your organization into the analytics-driven and intelligent stages of retail maturity requires transforming an omnichannel customer experience with technological innovations:

Open up real-time insights into data that's understandable and accessible, and quickly synchronize with your future customers' evolving expectations in an increasingly competitive online marketplace. Read the full Tractor Supply Company story.
Forecast future customer sales outcomes from supply chain and sales data and make data-driven business decisions taking advantage of advanced end-to-end machine learning forecasting models. Read the full Carhartt and Walgreens customer stories.
Identify top factors leading to customer revenue growth, with a unified and consistent view across data—implementing consistent data management practices across your organization. Read the full Chipotle customer story.

Accelerate your organization's move towards digital maturity

Azure solution accelerators offer your organization ready-to-deploy code with advanced machine learning models and big data analytics. Harness future-ready insights, make data-based decisions, quickly identify business growth trajectories—and increase your business value. Build a persistent customer conversation that drives a powerful omnichannel retail experience, everywhere.

Unify and make your data consistent across channels to deliver real-time insights with the Retail Recommender Solution accelerator. Take advantage of AI model training and development with Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Machine Learning Service. Use historical clickstream data and user events to unlock personalized interactions and preselected best offerings for your customers with AI-native shoppers in mind.

Take your organization's supply chain and sales data to the next retail cloud maturity level with the Demand Forecasting Solution accelerator. Transform supply chain and sales data into inputs to predictive outcomes—at scale, in real-time. Good data strategy and data management can solve complex supply chain and sales forecasting challenges efficiently. Use Azure Machine Learning to consolidate your end-to-end forecasting models, and train data from multiple sources to forecast future demand accurately—foundational for insights into profit margin, cash flow, and capacity planning.

Enable a unified, consistent view of data and unlocking an extended data flow across silos with the Modern Finance Solution accelerator brings data from different systems together, then builds and deploys a machine learning model using Azure Synapse Analytics—identifying the top factors that can predict, with increasing accuracy over time, activities likely to result in higher customer revenue growth.

Align your organization's cloud maturity model

The retail cloud maturity model describes the stages of digital retail maturity. Innovation becomes critical when organizations move into the analytics-driven retail and intelligent retail stages.

One example of achieving intelligent retail maturity is the retail recommender, which uses data, applications, analytics, and AI to enhance the retail experience.

Democratize data

The most important step to innovation is democratizing data, because data that's accessible and understandable across the organization fuels innovation.

This step is accelerated through the use of a common industry-specific data model. Maintaining a common model breaks down silos that stifle communication between applications and limit data democratization. When all employees, processes, and applications operate from a common data model, they can all apply technology to improve products and services.

To extend your common data model, use cloud native tools in Azure:

Microsoft Power BI to create rich visualizations and build business insights from your data models. Build and share reports and dashboards, and provide notifications, to bring the power of your data to your workforce.
Azure Purview to classify and add metadata to data sources, making it easier for all users to the find the data they need.
Azure Data Factory to move and transform data for use by various applications and reports.
Azure Synapse Analytics for a unified data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics experience. Use Azure Synapse Analytics to ingest, explore, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.
Other big data sources, such as Hadoop, HDInsight, and Databricks, to allow data scientists to build advanced analytics solutions from existing data.

Engage customers with applications

Learn more about ways you can build applications to extend, improve, and automate your retail processes.

Power Platform empowers citizen developers from business teams across sales, payroll, and finance departments. Extend your common data model by empowering teams to create their own Power Apps and Power Automate solutions.
Intelligent experiences build modern applications in the cloud with web apps or serverless functions. Infuse intelligence into the applications with speech, text, vision, and chat bots.

Augment the omnichannel retail experience with devices

Learn more about using device interactions to get closer to your customers through connected devices, perhaps devices you already have.

Mobile experiences: Extend customer interactions through the rapid development of mobile apps and Power Apps for mobile experiences.
IoT: Collect data in near-real-time from devices in your retail, supply chain, and other environments.

Next steps

The following articles will help you succeed in your cloud adoption journey.