Technology and Retail Trends of the Future

New Retail: These Stores Have Many Products But No Shelves

Koç University – Migros Retail Research Center KÜMPEM Forum 4th Retail Conference events took place on 15 and 16 May 2014 in two different venues.

Theme of the conference in 2014 , which aimed to meet the retailing sector,which is one of the featured sectors with brand and growth rate in Turkey, with global know-how and applications was “New Technologies, Digital and Mobile Applications in Retail Sector”.

This year the Kümpem Forum conference, which was extended to two days due to the intensity of the program and the interest it received, started with an opening highlighting the theme of the day.The forum director told the audience that operational efficiency can only be achieved through multifaceted methods for the success of selecting the product portfolio and managing the supply chain end-to-end during this period, when the new digital applications and channels are pushing the retailers to rediscover themselves and breaking the pace of the conference speed.

The conference participants had the opportunity to listen to the different aspects of retailing in the retail store beyond the walls in both virtual reality and physical store formats and to visit the demo of a virtual reality store.

The opening speech of the first day program on 15 May 2014 in The Marmara Taksim, Istanbul was made by Gil Roth, Vice President of Innovation and Portfolio Strategy of NCR which provides retailing, management and customer solutions in the retail sector all over the world. While managing the widespread store network, he provided examples of how retailers use technology to differentiate services within the store and interact with customers outside the store.

Roth emphasized his expectations on flexible, various, easy and inexpensive solutions with the customer oriented, self-centered attitude in an environment where everyone, whether young or old, is connected to internet through their phones and able to surf through various places.

.Pointing out to the fact that these developments have led to the competition of physical space retailing;and it added new exams on physical diversity, limited diversity and service practices, Roth proposed that the solution will be in the applications that technology stores and teams will come together to develop.He pointed to the virtual stores as the first transition point of the digital store experience in the new era.

Following the presentation of Gil Roth, Prof. Michel Wedel took the stage and continued this time with his speech on the support of technology in the visualization of shop arrangements.With examples of new eye-tracking technologies, he has shown how much we actually see and perceive shelves.

Professor Wedel shared with the customers what they saw on the shelves as they wandered the store and shared the change of their perceptions with videos.Vishal Gaur introduced a new key indicator to the retail world for inventory tracking and inventory management: AIT Adjusted Inventory Turnover Rate.

Accurate valuation in retail inventory becomes very important for stores, investors and suppliers, especially as the variety of categories and categories increases.This is not easy, however, because inventory turnover can be a superficial parameter that actually obscures a complex detail as a rough measure.

Based on the fact that among the sectors with gross profits very different from each other, inventory turnover rates are also very different, and emphasizing that it is insufficient to consider only the rates, he exemplified the AIT and its benefits in retail management.

Jie Zhang from the University of Maryland’s presentation included examples of customer-centric marketing practices in campaigns and promotions.

Today, Zhang shares the necessity to go beyond separating campaigns with content and time matching features, according to target customer groups and shared how technology and IT applications can respond to whom and when to design a campaign.

Catching the Speed ​​of Fashion Retail

Nowadays, fashion retailers have adopted different dynamics, collections, and retail brand management has taken on a new face in recent years.Retailers who have started to spend the year with more collections that have a shorter life span may have to use campaign pricing and so on. The processes are also differentiated, new procurement rules are advanced.

IESE Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, who argues that this new order is one of the important criteria of success, in being able to respond quickly to the demand, exemplified this thesis with the work they carried out for a brand in 140 countries in 7 countries. He pointed out that production flexibility and speed reduce the season opening and inventory risk in fashion retailers in order to respond to in-season demands, and that cost-benefit analysis should be done well.

In the afternoon session, in the first of many presentations including KÜMPEM funded researches in the fashion sector, Prod. Dr. Gürhan Kök and Yunus Koç presented their work that sheds light on the optimization arrangements that can be made in the distribution of demand and orders on the basis of models.Koç University faculty member Berk Ataman exemplified the fact that a digital application for retail is now being developed for every need and showed that the short life of these applications is related to the pricing of the applications at many times.