Transcript

Hi! My name is Brian Bliss. I'm a client partner covering the retail sector for Valorem Reply here in the US. I wanted to just take a few minutes and talk about really three kind of key things that I see within the Retail CPG sector. One is going to be data monetization strategies. The second will be data security and then the third component which might be not expected will be change management, and the importance of change management within your retail organization. 

So if I talk just a real quick around the data modernization. So as a retail CPG customer and business, there's so much volume of data and there's such a variety of data you have vast amounts that are coming from various resources including sales transactions, supply chain, marketing campaigns, you name it. And then managing that data which comes from all those different areas in different formats can be overwhelming and it's hard to pull that together, so that second piece is data integration. So integrating that data from all of those disperate systems and sources such as various retailers, distributors and third party providers is a common challenge. You also have the challenge of legacy systems and siloed data across different departments which complicates things even further. So having a modernization strategy that accounts for all of that is very important the second thing that I mentioned was the area of data security this is certainly more than just an area that impacts retail. It really impacts every business in every sector. We consistently see in the news where cyberattacks are happening but for you as a retail business the data privacy and security is paramount protecting that consumer data is of utmost priority because if there is a mishandling of that personal info, it can lead to reputational damage can lead to legal issues and a loss of consumer trust which is so huge in your business.

The third topic I just wanted to mention is change management and change management is something that's so probably underrated in really all sectors but without change management and adoption strategies, the investment that you make as an organization can fall way short of what you would want. You make significant investments in these tools and resources and having executive and senior leadership commitment and comprehensive adoption plans in place to adopt those new technologies they might not stick. So it's very important to have somebody that's got some expertise around that to help you in your business and in your organization to try and do the adoption and change management and really have high adoption so that the investment is well valued. We specifically, just if I were give you an example, we've seen that play out a lot this year with all of the various co-pilot solutions. We specifically have seen great success in the M365 co-pilot. We've had some rollouts of large organizations - 8,000 and 10,000 plus, which to get that size of an organization to a 90 plus per adoption rate is huge and we've been able to do that and see that experience. So we'd love to have a conversation with you around what it looks like to enter into a change management discussion.

I want to leave you with just this thought. We have security workshops that we actually also provide, that I think could be valuable to you as a retail organization. Some of these workshops are around threat protection and data security. In many instances they're actually funded completely by Microsoft. So as a partner we can help you deliver those and provide an overall assessment. If that's something that would be of interest to you. Feel free to reach out to me I would love to have a conversation. Thanks for taking a few minutes to listen and look forward to talking again soon.