Below you will find our library of industry white papers outlining issues and solutions for inventory management, customer databases, and retail technology. We hope these resources provide you with valuable insight and you find them useful to your business.

Smarter Supply Chain Utilization for the Retailer
This paper introduces various supply chain concepts and explains their importance. It describes initiatives being undertaken by the largest retailers and reviews what small and mid-size firms need to do to compete. Very few small and mid-size retailers can compete with companies like Wal-Mart on price. However, while some go to the wall, many smaller retailers prosper alongside Wal-Mart exploiting the traffic that they generate and managing their own supply chains and customer propositions well.

Smarter Retailing: Advisors & Clients

The results of this Microsoft Retail white paper were derived from a Retail Roundtable held by Microsoft Canada who sponsored a day-long gathering of consumers, retailers and technology providers at the Microsoft Conference Center in Mississauga, ON to exchange of ideas about enhancing customer service and maximizing returns. In a series of roundtables and break-out sessions, the participants examined the trends that are transforming the industry. They discussed business strategies for maximizing returns and they debated the role of technology in providing superior customer service, better insight into operations and improved employee productivity.

RFID Overview: Introduction to Radio Frequency Identification

RF technology is used in many different applications, such as television, radio, cellular phones, radar, and automatic identification systems. The term RFID (radio frequency identification) describes the use of radio frequency signals to provide automatic identification of items. This technology is becoming increasingly popular in retail and this document briefly overviews the technology.

RFID In Retail: The Future Is Now

Today’s retailers stand at the forefront of a truly revolutionary technology – Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID places the retail industry at the cusp of a new era where real-time determination of product availability and movement is possible, enabling dramatic improvements in operational efficiency, customer service, and profitability. Understanding the benefits of RFID and initiating the strategic planning required to incorporate it into your organization are the first steps to leveraging the technology.

Beyond POS—Two Technologies That Can Significantly Increase Sales and Profits

The two “highest payback” technologies that many independent retailers are using to increase their productivity and profitability are: Open-to-Buy Forecasting and Traffic Counting. The purpose of this paper is to examine two of these technologies in more depth and give you insights into how they work, what the benefits are for your store and some possible pitfalls that you should avoid. These two technologies have one thing in common, they give an independent retailer not only a significant competitive advantage but also provide efficiencies that deliver greater customer service as well as increased operating margins by increasing productivity.

CRM Revisited: Using Customer Insight to Build Competitive Advantage

This retail white paper examines the concept of customer insight and using that knowledge to become more profitable. Do you know who your most valuable customers are? What are their needs? What motivates them to buy? The answers will help to differentiate your store from the competition.

Avoiding Extinction: Small Business Retailer Survival in the 21st Century

“Making a living” as an independent retailer has become harder and harder. The best locations have become unaffordable, as landlords raise rents to a level that only national chain stores, with their unattainable economies of scale, can afford to pay. Local customers may wish a retailer well, but unless that retailer has exceptional products or customer service, they will still gravitate to the lowest cost provider. In these times, working harder is no longer enough. Instead, small retailers must work smarter to capture a reasonable share of their customer’s wallet. The small retailer is threatened with extinction and only a dramatic shift will make this once critical segment profitable again. When you expand to the Web, Store Operations has already paved the road. Manage all your sales, inventory, customers, and records in one easy package. As you expand, keep the same database, the same interface. Both will scale up seamlessly. You and your staff keep the same powerful Store Operations tools with no retraining.

The Retailers Guide to Effective Software

This Microsoft Retail white paper acts as a guide which provides an overview of modern software functionality for your small to midsize retail company and discusses how you can take advantage of this technology. Modern retail systems will enable you to tie your enterprise together, manage inventory better and, most importantly, offer better service to your customers so they become loyal patrons.

The Weakest Link: An examination of chain store productivity with a 4-step process to address problem stores

A challenge for any executive responsible for more than two stores is the realization that you are only as good as your weakest store. Customers judge you by what you deliver and if you have a store that is not delivering, it can affect all your stores. But what measures do you use to judge that weakest link? How much variance should there be before a red flag goes up? And, just as importantly, what do you do to strengthen that link when you have discovered that it is a problem? This Retail white paper examines four key steps to evaluating and analyzing the strength of your retail stores.

Ten Proven Steps to Sell Smart With Data Intelligence

This Microsoft Retail white paper outlines ten steps that you as a retailer can follow to get the most out of the data you collect in store and how to become more profitable.

The Effects of POS Implementation and Retail Technology on Sales and Profitability for Small to Mid Sized Retailers

The purpose of this white paper is to explore the impact of the deployment of technology in a retail business. More specifically, we will look at the effects on sales, profitability and productivity of the use of Point of Sale, Inventory Control and Customer Profiling Software in small to mid-sized retail stores.

The Real Cost Of Inventory — Why You Can Have Too Much Of A Good Thing

It is a fact that for almost all retailers inventory is the single largest asset on the balance sheet. Yet, despite all the improvements in technology over the past twenty five years, inventory continues to be the least productive asset for most retailers. There are three factors that have the biggest impact on inventory. First the SKU intensity of the product, second the re-order cycle time and lastly the nature of the merchandise, either consumables or discretionary. These three factors each bring a special twist to the inventory problem and we will discuss each one while giving you some insights into how to address them in order to maximize your inventory investment.