TCS Smart Digital Merchandizing Suite

Overview

Customer preferences are becoming more dynamic, retailers need to create relevant products that meet customer needs and onboard them in stores and online as timely and efficient as possible. However, retailers across the globe are losing opportunities (5-8% of revenue) due to operational challenges. Many retailers still rely on legacy systems and traditional practices like using spreadsheets to manually plan and manage key merchandizing processes, resulting in:

• Challenges in onboarding their suppliers and products at the right time
• Capturing complete and accurate product information
• Responding immediately to market fluctuation or competitor price changes
• Ineffective collaboration throughout the promotion management cycle

All these challenges act as a hinderance in achieving strategic growth ambitions of the retailer.

Key Features & Functionality

Smart Digital Merchandizing Suite is a TCS Crystallus Composable Business solution created on Appian's Low Code Platform. Embracing the new-age Composable Business philosophy. The solution is built with TCS' domain expertise, contextual knowledge, and industry next-practices leveraging intelligent technologies like Appian as an Enabler.

Solution aims to alleviate these challenges and inefficiencies by digitally reimagining key merchandising processes. It equips retailers with a platform to centrally manage their key merchandising operations and provides a rich user experience.
Its modular design enables the retailer to purchase either one module or a combination of multiple modules.

Salient features of each module and the business impacts:

• Supplier Management
  • Self-serve portal with optimized workflows for faster supplier onboarding.
  • 360-degree view of all supplier data and service-level agreements.

• Product Management
  • Self-serve portal for omni-channel product onboarding.
  • Integration with GS1 for product data syndication and product enrichment.
  • Integration with TCS AI accelerators are used for product classifiers, data extraction.

• Pricing
  • Centralized price management for differentiated, localized pricing.
  • Automated margins-driven, rule-based price changes for millions of SKUs.

• Promotions
  • End-to-end omni-channel promotions management from planning to execution.
  • Dynamic promotions capabilities in response to competitor promotions.

• Unified Merchant Workbench​
  • Provides a unified view of business and process health through various metrics ​
  • Actionable insights from all modules and workflows accumulated and prioritized based on impact​

Benefits & Business Impact

• 3x faster supplier onboarding
• 60% faster product onboarding
• 50–60% productivity improvement of Merchandising & buying teams
• Improved Supplier and employee experience. Enhanced cross-functional and supplier collaboration
• 100% Price change accuracy. Repricing made faster, agile and accurate.
• Improved business agility Minimize revenue loss from operational inefficiencies
• Enhanced data and digital artifacts quality using intelligent algorithms
• Improved product searchability