IBM Helps Retailers Be Competitive in Holiday Buying Season

By Darryl K. Taft

As the holiday shopping season arrives, retailers require various analytical tools to ensure optimal effectiveness of their sales and marketing strategies. Retailers need to provide their customers with new ways to interact and shop, while also winning new consumers and driving down costs.

Serving more than 80 million guests annually worldwide with 200 menu items made from scratch, The Cheesecake Factory deals with large volumes of data in its food supply chain. The challenge was to gain insight from this data to better serve its guests and to deliver an exceptional dining experience. Using an IBM big data analytics solution built on IBM Power Systems, The Cheesecake Factory can now quickly alert locations to remove any ingredient that does not meet its high standards, ensuring the highest level of quality and food safety for its guests.

NS Shopping, a leading home shopping network in South Korea, selected IBM to facilitate an enterprisewide transformation, meant to simultaneously improve customer experiences and the organization’s technology infrastructure. The company implemented an IBM Smarter Commerce analytics and e-commerce technology solution with IBM Power and System x servers, enabling it to uncover data insights on consumer preferences, while developing mobile applications to deliver a consistent, connected customer experience across multiple devices.

Bonhams, one of the U.K.’s oldest and most successful auctioneers, has been selling thousands of priceless antiques all over the globe for more than 200 years, but was having difficulty managing its U.S. data centers. So the company deployed an open-source solution with IBM System x3650 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to manage its data centers, reducing its number of servers by 75 percent, saving 40 percent on project costs and ensuring global business continuity.

Because Globus, the premier department store subsidiary of Migros Group, sells in Switzerland’s highly competitive consumer fashion marketplace, trend spotting is vital to business success. Migros implemented an IBM System x3690 X5 solution for real-time reporting and sales performance analysis, providing insight into the latest trends, as well as allowing the company to adapt its pricing and provide special offers according to changes in the market.

Silhouette, a designer and manufacturer of lightweight eyewear, sells close to 2.2 million pairs of eyeglasses each year. This is thanks in large part to its production and sales teams, who require rapid information access 24/7. To meet this need, Silhouette deployed IBM Power 740 servers running IBM i with the integrated IBM DB2 database, creating a high-availability configuration that maximizes uptime, giving fast access to the information Silhouette needs to support profitable, efficient operations around the clock.

Based in Japan, Shiseido, a global manufacturer and retailer of beauty products, developed plans for its long-term strategy and financial goals, and realized it needed to create a core system for global standards to achieve those goals. A solution consisting of IBM Power Systems server running the IBM AIX operating system, IBM DS8100 storage and System Networking SAN Fibre Channel Switches was adopted to run applications for financial accounting, sales and logistics, inventory management, procurement and manufacturing processes.

U.K.-based MetaPack provides software solutions to help the U.K.’s top online retailers automate and optimize the customer delivery experience. After launching a new SaaS delivery model, MetaPack developed a flexible cloud platform based on IBM BladeCenter E Chassis with BladeCenter H22 servers, System x 3650 servers and Storwize V7000 storage, providing a solid base and improving reliability and flexibility of its IT environment.

Peach John, a women’s apparel retailer in Japan, relies on email campaigns to help drive sales through its Website, retail stores and catalog, but was experiencing low response rates. So the company adopted a sophisticated multichannel marketing campaign solution based on IBM System x3500 servers that uses emails to build relationships with customers, helping to increase sales, boost repeat business and simplify the campaign planning process.

Movado, founded in Switzerland and based in the United States, was running a mix of business systems in supply chain and accounting, causing reduced visibility into inventory data. The company chose to consolidate its hardware around the world into a pair IBM Power Systems in a single data center in New Jersey. The systems run IBM i, with integrated DB2 databases and SAP, to generate performance metrics and other real-time business data, getting its products to suppliers more efficiently, which has led to increased sales.