Retail Practice Overview
Industry overview and challenges
The retail sector has evolved constantly to keep pace with the changing customer demands profiles, the primary needs being efficient services at competitive prices. The sector has had to balance on a delicate fulcrum of margins and high investments on technology spend business. Add to this is the challenge of low consumer confidence and purchase in recent times, pronounced especially in North America and Europe.
According to a study by Datamonitor Research, cutting cost is the biggest priority for retailers in North America and Europe in 2009 on the way to sustained business growth through innovation and differentiation. Retailers are constantly looking at technology and Business Intelligence and Analytics tools as key pillars to create differentiation and increase competence. Store solutions such as Point of Sale, Mobile POS and Self Checkout are critical technologies that help retailers provide efficiency and competence in managing sales. Retailers are seeking to minimize set up cost and improve time-to-market both for technology and products.
Symphony Services partners with retail clients whose products serve all areas of Retail Value Chain.
Click here to see the Symphony’s Retail Value Chain experienceHow SSC helped its clients
- Saved USD 33+M in the engineering spend for a client in the 6+ years of partnership
- Reduced time to market by >4 months using Symphony Product Framework for grounds up dev of a retail product
- Reduced QA cycle time of many product QA Phases, using SSC Retail industry knowledge & Symphony Test Automation framework
- Regulatory Compliance and Conformance
- Engineered and Tested solutions for PCI/DSS certification using Symphony’s PCI/DSS test library and in process resulting in a >30% lesser time
- Transformed Multi Channel Solution to Cross Channel Solution, by Integrated Order Mgmt & Order Fulfillment solution to eCommerce & Contact Center applications
- For one of our clients, reduced customer escalation by ~70% in 6 months, by delivering the customer solution releases on-time with high quality, consistently, there by completely changed the market perception of the product engineering
- For our European client, defined and implemented the complete QA process for the GOLD release of the product, there by instilled high level of confidence in the clients’ customers
- Efficient Sustenance engineering of Legacy product/solutions
- ~10 Products are in Sustenance Engg
- Symphony’s sustenance engineering best practices helped in ~25% Reduced Cost of Engg, while increasing the customer satisfaction on the legacy products of various technologies
- Participates in all the phases of PDLC (From Product Management to Release management) across the Retail ISVs
Symphony’s Retail Value Chain experience
Offerings
- POS Testing Services
Client base
Symphony Retail Experience
- 1900+ Man-years of PDLC Expertise in Retail Industry
- 500+ People with Retail Industry understanding
- 35+ products under management
- 50+ Major Product releases in 2009
- 200+ Visible & High-impact ideas majority accepted by clients
- Retail Center Of Excellence and Competency Engine to continuously build and enhance the Retail industry knowledge.
Testimonials
Thomas Mudd VP, Development for General Retail, Escalate Retail (on The Times of India, Tech Times dated November, 2007)
“Symphony is a strategic partner in our development efforts and represents a significant percentage of our R&D; investment. This is one reason why innovation from our Symphony team is critical. Because they are a large team, we need them to bring in new ideas, new approaches and new solutions…. As we ramped up our Symphony team, the first goal was to achieve operational efficiency… The next step was to move from development execution to product innovation…. As Symphony gained exposure to our clients, our domain and our objectives, they also gained the ability to add value at a higher level…. Moving from execution to innovation is essentially an iterative process… As teams gain experience and prove themselves on one assignment, they are earning trust for the next project. Based on each success, we are able to assign increasingly complex projects with reduced levels of oversight… While there are challenges to the offshore development model, overcoming them is part of becoming an optimised software vendor. Symphony has been a good partner and their business model works well with our long term goals.”
Torex
Graeme Cooksley, President & COO, Torex
“One of our business goals centers on expanding and extending our portfolio of solutions, particularly as we cultivate global markets like North America. To help meet that goal, we selected Symphony Services based on the company’s best practices for establishing highly-collaborative and productive development teams that work seamlessly with their clients’ current engineers. In order to proactively address the increasingly complex business needs of our customers, we will rely on Symphony to support our own global development teams by accessing its expanded engineering capabilities to help us exceed quality and time-to-market benchmarks associated with the delivery of innovative, industry-leading retail solutions.”