Building and upgrading the information system of large retail enterprises

From the current development of retailing industry, the construction and promotion of business information automation management system can be divided into two parts: extension function and internal function.

How to build and enhance the extension function

1, efficient consumer response (ECR): ECR is the retail enterprise to meet customer demand for solutions and core technology, the goal is the most efficient to meet the growing and diverse needs of consumers. Only in order to better meet the needs of consumers, retailers, distributors and manufacturers can survive and development, to be more competitive. ECR is a system in which enterprises in the circulation supply chain work closely with each other to understand the needs of consumers and to build up a rapid response capability based on consumer demand. ECR is aimed at increasing the value of consumers, improving the efficiency of the whole supply chain and reducing the cost of the whole system, so as to improve the enterprise's competitive ability. With the development of the retail industry, ECR will promote the whole industry in all aspects of cooperation, the formulation of industry standards to promote efficient and benign development of the industry.

ECR includes three key strategies for retailing: Customer-oriented retail mode (consumer value model), category management, and supply chain management.

1 customer-oriented retail model (consumer value model): Through customer survey, competitor investigation, market consumption trend research, identify target customer groups, understand their strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, determine their own positioning and characteristics, build core competitiveness; Select the product mix and the business category around the customers group, Determine the definition of category and the different roles of category in store management, determine the business strategy and tactics of the store (pricing, promotion, new product introduction, replenishment, etc.), develop business metrics and business development plans.

2 Category Management: To manage the category as a strategic business unit, focusing on the process of improving business outcomes by satisfying consumer needs. Category management is the process of continuously satisfying the consumers with data as the basis for decision-making. Category management is the refinement of retail business management. The main tactics are efficient product mix, efficient shelf management, efficient new product introduction, efficient pricing and promotion, efficient replenishment.

3 Supply Chain Management: Build and strengthen supply chain management system, promote the information sharing and exchange with suppliers, shorten the time of goods in transit, and speed up the circulation of goods within the enterprise. With the large-scale development of retail enterprises, especially the emergence of chain management development model, the retail enterprise's commodity sales scale (varieties, sales volume, sales area) has been expanding, virtually accelerated the product to the conversion speed of goods, at the same time the commodity and reaction to products, Suppliers are required to quickly organize the production and procurement of products according to market demand. Then supply both sides need a fast, efficient, accurate exchange of information application platform, this is the supply chain management demand base. Establish the process and specification of whole supply chain management, formulate supply chain management index, shorten supply chain by using advanced information technology and logistics technology, reduce artificial error, improve reliability and rapid response ability of supply chain, improve the data accuracy and timeliness of supply chain through standardization management. Establish retailer and supplier data exchange mechanism, jointly manage supply chain, minimize inventory and shortage rate and reduce logistics cost.

ECR information Technology implementation includes the following: 1 customer-oriented retail model: including POS system, Market/Customer survey database, membership database, group purchase database, shopping basket analysis. 2 Category Management system: including cross category analysis, decision Data Warehouse, shelf management/store layout management, commodity portfolio analysis and optimization, pricing, promotional analysis, new product introduction evaluation, profit/cost accounting. 3 Supply Chain management: including automatic proposal order system, supplier management inventory/Joint management inventory system, warehouse/transport scanning technology, electronic data interchange, electronic commerce, etc.

2, Customer Relationship Management system (CRM): CRM system in the financial, insurance and other fields have a wide range of applications, its role is also obvious. But the customer of the retail enterprise has its own characteristic, its fluidity is big, the contingency is big, the characteristic is not obvious, does not facilitate the tracking, the localization, this also has added the difficulty to the CRM system in the retail business implementation, has restricted to its contains the information the utilization. At present, the community of supermarkets, professional stores (home appliances, audio-visual, books) generally through the membership card this marketing tool for the foundation of the establishment of CRM system. In addition, large retail enterprises can be in the branches of the internal establishment of "touch screen Shopping System", "TV Guide Broadcast System", "After-sales service system", as far as possible to record the exchange of information with customers, narrowing the distance between each other to provide targeted services. If according to the information to the customer parasitic day greeting card, through the after-sale distribution system of information on the purchase of household electrical appliances customers regularly call to inquire about the use of electrical appliances.

3, the construction, strengthens the distribution Center management system: The system can improve the automatization of warehousing and distribution, reduce the storage cost, increase the storage capacity, strengthen the initiative of replenishment in the store, provide the third party logistics distribution, increase the new profit source of the enterprise, and realize the distribution role from "Sales terminal role" to "partial brand merchandise". "Change, or both avid, so that enterprises in the entire supply chain in a more favorable position.

The establishment of distribution center system consists of two aspects, first, the establishment of the accounting unit of the distribution center, followed by the establishment of the internal automation system of the distribution center. At present, most of the domestic retail enterprises only partially achieve the first level, this is because the enterprise sales scale is not big enough, the strength of the enterprise is limited. Small-scale distribution centers are mainly for the internal delivery of enterprises to provide distribution services, solve the accounting blind spot of commodity warehousing cost, make it become the business operation that can track and monitor, solve the problem that some goods in the store (especially the home appliance products) display the cost too high, so that only a small number of samples are placed in the store, and the store purchase is unified after sale. Can realize the trans-region commodity allocation, the reasonable distribution commodity resources, finally realizes the commodity profit maximization, reduces the supplier's delivery cost, lowers the purchase cost, shortens the purchase cycle. So the establishment of distribution center is the key to realize the chain operation of retail enterprises, especially the development of different places.

4, the construction, strengthen the front sales system and financial, tax and other units of data exchange functions: At present, the general retail enterprises are using the financial institutions of their own bank POS system, resulting in fragmented, system operation complex, cash register for a long time, cash register cost increases, data stability, consistency is poor. The establishment of a unified bank card consumption system, to integrate with the front selling system, we must first obtain the support of the financial settlement institutions, which provide the retail enterprises with the bank card data Processing machine (referred to as the front machine), through the dedicated line to the settlement server of the financial settlement institution, so that all the front desk registers can be directly consumed. According to the relevant rules of data interface, the system is accurate and fast to deal with bank card consumption settlement. At present, there are known as "China's Visa card" UnionPay card is in the national medium and large cities gradually debut. By the end of 2003, all non-"UnionPay" logo card Exchange card work completed. This not only accelerates the cash register speed, but also accelerates the cash delivery between the retail enterprise and the financial clearing institution, realizes the system automatic checking data, and reduces the financial and financial institutions reconciliation work. With the continuous improvement of the domestic tax collection system and the emergence of tax control POS machine, the cash register system of the future retail enterprises will also need to realize the exchange of some data with the tax unit, so that the whole tax declaration work is completed automatically in the sales process.

Ii. How to build and strengthen internal functions

1, the construction, strengthens the Enterprise office automation system. To solve the problems of decentralized office management, financial accounting, personnel assessment and administrative coordination in different places of retail enterprises, to avoid the dispersed situation of personnel and business, and to make the whole business process disjointed, monitor and check real time decrease. The retail business has its own industry characteristics, specifically to achieve four types of information sharing, Exchange: First, business-type data sharing, mainly refers to a variety of business operations, documents, business certificate Exchange, Audit, follow-up (orders, acceptance orders); the second is the sales analysis of data sharing, mainly refers to the management to provide guidance, Supervision of related performance data (various sales Analysis report); The third is the document type data, mainly refers to various administrative, the approval document and so on does not appear by the database type data, four is the multimedia data, mainly refers to the voice, the image data exchange, for instance meeting, the business communication and so on.

In fact, the retail enterprises can be phased out in accordance with the actual needs of enterprises, realize the first two can be achieved through the transformation of their own POS system. Some software vendors have proposed the concept of "data-driven business", in fact, the essence of the POS system in the business platform to integrate a part of the functions of office automation, all the business document collaboration through the Enterprise's internal mail, instant Messaging module, in the shortest possible time accurate transmission, notification to the next business link operator, And through the system record to follow up, feedback business operation problems. This can make the whole business operation in a relatively normative, fast, accurate, complete environment, can make full use of the enterprise Internal network platform, enhance the internal communication efficiency of enterprises, for the ultimate in the enterprise internal network transmission of multimedia data, that is, through the enterprise internal network media to achieve online meeting, Voice communication lay a good foundation.

2, establish and strengthen the integration of the retail enterprises within the relevant systems (financial, personnel, business) platform, so that these systems can be data exchange and comparison. Now foreign more common realization program is through EIP (Enterprise Information Portal System solution) or enterprise knowledge management solution. The implementation is through the establishment of an intranet, the Internet and the combination of the structure, ie as the client output operation, data extraction tools, according to each employee division of labor, the role of the different, simulated a virtual office environment, Office matters through the Personal web interface operation to complete, At the same time, the system automatically records, tracking operation content, the various information collation, integration into a valuable enterprise knowledge. Other business systems can establish data interfaces with it to enable relevant people to extract and manipulate business data. International large software vendors have launched their own intermediary platform, such as the Microsoft OFFICE-XP solution in the SharePoint SEVER, Biz-talk server two software packages, application software vendors can easily on these platforms for the end user to do two times development, Promote the enterprise to realize the process of knowledge management.

3, establish and strengthen the retail enterprise internal data collation and excavation work. With the development and growth of retail enterprises, the data produced by enterprise business is also more and more, it contains the information is undoubtedly quite large, to improve and adjust the enterprise management has a considerable guiding significance, and even the entire social production resources of the rational flow, distribution will play an inestimable positive role. Therefore, the enterprise's capital, talent, management and other data will become the core competitiveness of enterprises, enterprises are irreplaceable valuable wealth. But the current domestic retail enterprises to this wealth is not enough attention. Enterprise to it just do a simple roughing, not systematic, comprehensive, in-depth mining analysis processing, to its preservation, collation, archiving work is almost zero. The establishment of enterprise Data Warehouse is the general trend, is the prerequisite to realize data socialization, make full use of this precious resource, will certainly give the retail enterprise, the society brings the rich return.

Some similarities in system construction

The retail industry is a challenging, competitive and changeable industry, enterprises have their own actual situation, industry, location, positioning, system, strength and other related factors formed the characteristics of the enterprise. How to establish and strengthen the enterprise information system should be implemented according to the enterprise characteristic finally. Although the steps and effects vary widely, there are several things that are common:

1, should arrange, standardize the business operation flow within the enterprise, make it in a relatively stable state, can not blindly pursue flexible business practices, pay attention to balance the "long-term" and "immediate" conflict of interest.

2. The information technology sector should play an important role in its implementation. The Information Department should use information technology to realize enterprise informatization and improve business process, perfect internal information system to meet the requirements of ECR on data analysis, establish standardization and standardize, improve data accuracy. This requires that the excavation and training of information technicians is a "complex" talent that understands both business and technology, and has the ability to analyze problems, improve business processes, communicate, project management and lead. At present, this kind of talent is very few, but they are the key to establish the enterprise characteristic information system.

3. Strengthen the ability of employees to understand, analyze and utilize data information. Only the whole enterprise's employees are integrated into the information system construction use and management, can make the system play a strong vitality, so enterprises should pay attention to the staff of the business training work. (from the Internet)