Retailers continuously seek to drive profitable revenue growth by optimising inventory levels and delivering the right products to customers. Technology helps them to not merely clip costs but also to align the process. In an interaction with Sangita Ghosh, Sameer Batra, vice president - distribution sector, IBM India & South Asia, reveals how IBM is helping retailers create demand-driven supply chains.

What solutions does IBM offer to its retail clients?

We enable our retail clients drive profitable growth, deliver targets, personalised promotions, and then deliver on the promise with consistent merchandise assortments and service. The end objective is to turn customers into loyal advocates by enabling them to shop however, whenever and wherever they want. Our solutions are focused on delivering a smarter shopping experience, creating smarter merchandising and supply chains and building smarter operations.

Indian retail is still evolving and needs help from technology. How does IBM respond to that?

IBM sees the retail sector growing at a rapid pace and strongly feels that there needs to be a lot more involvement from the technology partner to help retailers gain a competitive edge in the market. We have a dedicated team in India who understand the industry and bring with them the experience of having worked with leading global retailers.

We have also invested in innovations such as ‘Retail Optimised Site Selection’ tool that will help retailers choose the most optimal locations for their stores in a scientific manner. Other solutions focus on business intelligence, customer analytics and CRM. We also engage with our clients to plan and develop projects at our labs and solution centres in India and La Gaude in France.

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