Compared to other industries, retailers are late to the digital transformation agenda. Yet they cannot take a time-out to perform a wall-to-wall redesign of their operations on either the selling side or the supply side of their businesses. So where should they start? Which business processes are the best candidates for digital transformation strategies?

These are the questions that the RSR team sought to answer in this study. Some of the highlights of what we found:

• INVESTMENT: The top three investment priorities for retailers all relate to servicing consumers across digital and physical boundaries. This means that optimizing processes to better service consumers takes precedence over efforts to lower operating costs. This is entirely new ground for our industry.
• OPERATIONS: One year ago, retailers were most concerned about “real-time inventory accuracy”. Now, their top operational challenge is “visibility into customer’s shopping behaviors”. This is all about leveraging the digital signals generated by shoppers’ digital paths-to-purchase to understand and better serve them.
• TECHNOLOGY: When asked to rank the host of technologies that could go into a digital transformation strategy, retailers see RFID to provide real-time insights as the lynchpin to everything else that they hope to do.
• ROADBLOCKS: Less than 1 in 5 retailers points to cost as standing in their way. This is unprecedented; retailers know they can afford these technologies – they just don’t have the human capital to manage all of the things they would like to take on.

Like everything we write, this paper is free to all.