E-commerce consortium

The situation in the retail sector is considerably more diverse. A whole range of large, medium-sized and small retail companies currently have no or only rudimentary e-commerce components and have focused entirely on the stationary point of sale in recent years. This is currently a considerable disadvantage for them. Those who enable their customers to shop via digital channels are at an advantage. This also applies to the food sector. In Germany, e-commerce hardly played a role here before the crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating a development that began many years ago. The proportion of e-commerce sales has risen continuously. For many people, shopping online has long been part of their routine. Against this backdrop, a consortium has decided to create "Knowledge4Retail" (K4R), a digital platform that retailers can use to connect the analogue and digital worlds with the help of artificial intelligence, among other things. The partners include various scientific institutions, the drugstore chain dm and Nagarro ES.

Integration into the back-end

Nagarro ES's role in the consortium is largely to ensure that the platform can be integrated into the back-end systems of the user companies. That doesn't sound particularly exciting, but it is absolutely essential. After all, any use case that already exists or is yet to be created will only be successful if it is conceived as an end-to-end process and supported accordingly by IT.

For example: a shopping app with an outstanding user experience and sophisticated AI support is useless if there is no connection to the commercial and logistical data. This leaves open, for example, whether the desired product is in stock and when it can be delivered. And, of course, it would not be possible to pay online without integration.

Nagarro ES is currently dealing with questions relating to IT architecture: Which source and target systems are relevant? Which formats and protocols are relevant? And what do interfaces need to do? On the other hand, individual scenarios are being examined - also in order to apply and check assumptions about infrastructure.

Intelligent order picking

Nagarro ES can draw on experience that has already been gained in projects by Nagarro ES and Allgeier. For example, as part of the cooperation with Livello. The food and tech start-up has developed a smart kiosk that fully automates the sale of food and other products with the help of various innovative technologies. This makes these items accessible to customers at any time and in any place - be it directly at the workplace, in a hotel or as a shop-in-shop. The Micro Market is available as a refrigerator or freezer or as an intelligent shelf.

Allgeier ES has taken over the integration of this point of sale into an SAP environment and the automation of all downstream processes. New features have recently been added: for example, an electronic display is shown via the Livello refrigerator when customers log in or remove goods.

Together with SES-Imagotag, a provider of electronic price tags, Allgeier ES implemented an omni-channel scenario back in 2019 that precisely meets the requirements that many retailers are currently facing.

The connection between the front end and SAP back end makes the picking process more efficient and relieves the burden on employees: when customers order goods in a retailer's web store, this automatically triggers actions at the stationary POS. Employees in the store or warehouse are shown which products belong in a customer's shopping cart by means of different colored lights (pick-by-light), which speeds up the picking process considerably. A process for customer complaint management is also closely integrated.

Omni-channel

Of course, we don't know how the pandemic will develop. But we are absolutely convinced that there is no turning back when it comes to omni-channel sales. The vast majority of people are experiencing the charm of remote capability once again. And those who were rather sceptical about online shopping will now at least have recognized its usefulness.

However, "online only" will not prevail in the foreseeable future for a number of reasons. Instead, there will be more and more hybrid forms that combine the advantages of analog and digital touchpoints. We are optimistic that retail companies of all sizes will see the current development as motivation to break new ground. Those who do their duty and take care of integration at an early stage will be able to win over their customers at the right time with the free program - whether that's a smart refrigerator or perhaps a voice-controlled digital shopping assistant.