Intro to The Retail Transformation Journey

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” - Lao Tzu

The Retail & Consumer Industry is undergoing a massive transformation. Helping to combat this transformative change is Internet of Things (IoT) technology. With a focus on Omni-channel and the consumer experience, retailers still must bring the right products to market, at the right time and at the right price.

To assist retailers with this change, PTC has developed the Retail Transformation Journey (RTJ). This journey allows retailers that are new to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions achieve a digitally-enabled product design and development strategy utilizing the benefits of IoT. The Retail Transformation Journey includes four key Pathways.

These pathways interact to create a synergized product design and development process. For example, utilizing customer personas in planning drives the creation of products, which targets the selling of products specifically to that persona. The success of those targeted products then loops back into the planning of new products, seeding the design.

We created a roadmap for achieving Retail product design and development transformation in three phases. These phases lead to the ultimate goal of agile, continuous product delivery, informed by the voice-of-the-customer, and delivered through a highly-transparent supply chain.

The three phases of transformation that makeup the Retail Transformation Journey are:

1. Understand – focus on gaining basic insights into historic sales to inform better assortment planning, leverage voice of the customer, and enable basic vendor collaboration
2. Advance – refine market insights to plan by channel, advance PD&D efficiency through 3D design and Augmented / Virtual Reality, develop increased supply chain partnerships and dynamic costing
3. Outperform – shift to a season-less planning model, design/develop to detailed customer personas with personalized products, full transparency with suppliers, including analytics driven sourcing enabling a continuous fulfillment model to market.

We will deep dive into each Retail Transformation Journey phase a little further in the upcoming weeks but to learn more about PTC’s Retail Transformation Journey, check out the keynote from LiveWorx 2016 HERE.