- Retail today is undergoing significant transformation
driven by increased customer expectations,
competition, and cost inflation.
To compete, retailers need to manage operations
across every channel, digital and physical,
in particular, the store,
which today must balance customer service,
inventory management, e-commerce order fulfillment,
transactions, risk and loss preventions,
maintenance, and much more.
Hi, I'm Oxana Tepordei,
a Cloud Pak Platform Product Manager.
With IBM Cloud Paks, we've brought together
a series of hybrid cloud technologies
for integration, data, and AI in a unified platform
that seamlessly orchestrates
the dynamics of the modern retailer,
enabling better experiences for customers
and similar ways of working.
Let's consider a typical retailer with hundreds of stores,
thousands of store associates,
tens of thousands of products, and millions of customers.
Each day in real time, deliveries are made,
shelves are filled, stock is managed,
e-commerce order fulfilled, and customers are served.
Many of the typical daily processes
are planned or scheduled,
however, others are dynamic and require action in real time.
Let's take a closer look at what happens
when a customer goes to a retailer's website
and chooses to buy online and pick up in store.
While this is captured on the digital channel,
it now creates a new activity for the store to manage.
Here, the customer uses Watson Assistant
in IBM Cloud Pak for Data to amend their order.
In parallel, the store associate is notified
of the in-store pickup
and how this fits in with other store activities.
When the customer arrives, she confirms pickup
and the store associate is advised of her arrival.
At every stage, the system automatically coordinates
and prioritizes activities for the store associate,
who is just a click away from the applications he needs
to complete the activity.
And the customer is immediately informed
when her items are ready for collection.
Store teams can see what is being managed in real time,
allowing them to continuously identify
opportunities for improvement.
Let's look at what's enabling
this intelligent retail orchestration.
First, there's the retailers existing environment
containing many of their competitive differentiators
like ERP, commerce systems, or data.
None of this changes.
IBM Cloud Pathway integration
enables the flow of information
from multiple systems for a unified platform capability.
Here, we are capturing events securely in real time
for event streaming capability,
driving fully automated intelligent workflows
across the retail operation.
Now, we see IBM Cloud Pak for Data
triggering the relevant AI models
to optimize operations and experiences.
But this is not a black box.
All of the AI-driven orchestration
is visible and explainable.
Here, we see the models creating priority events.
Behind the scenes, Watson Knowledge Catalog normalizes data
using an open standards industry schema,
which facilitates the building and training of AI models
using Watson Studio, Watson Machine Learning,
decision optimization, and data virtualization
connecting to all operational, master, and external data.
IBM Cloud Pak for Data
makes the development and deployment of models easy,
ensuring they perform efficiently,
right task, right associate, right time
for the best customer experience.
Watson OpenScale tracks and measures outcomes from AI models
to ensure they remain fair, explainable, and compliant,
detecting and correcting model drift
while the model is in production.
Now, the customer can easily amend her order
using Watson Assistant,
automatically creating new activities for the store
for integration with critical systems,
giving the customer a seamless experience.
Because all of this runs on Red Hat OpenShift,
it can be deployed anywhere, on any cloud or on premises
with a common interface for DevOps and administration.
As you've seen, we've used IBM Cloud Paks
to enable a configurable unified platform
to orchestrate retail operations.
So instead of relying on the shared documentation
to establish standards,
retailers can now codify their retail operating model,
ensuring every store is orchestrated
to the same high standards,
both in performance and experience.
Thank you for watching.
If you have any questions, please drop us a line below.
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And don't forget,
if you want to learn more about IBM Cloud Paks,
please check out the links below.