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TotalStore solution from IBM
Executive summary Business view Technical details
The goal
Enhance the shopping experience anytime, anywhere
The IBM TotalStore Solution is designed to help you provide compelling reasons for consumers to shop your store. Make each product available when and where your consumers want it. Support a wide range of products, services and new concepts. Deliver a seamless experience. Be flexible for future capabilities yet to come to market. Our solution is helping companies worldwide enjoy these benefits today.

The advantage
Leverage our investments in innovation
In addition to the broad IBM portfolio of networking, loss prevention, portal, mobile, shopper-driven (self service) offerings and POS software, hardware and services, IBM provides:
  • Experienced professionals to work with you to develop a solution that is tailored to meet the specific needs of your business.
  • Expertise with workforce mobility. IBM pioneered processes and technologies to make knowledge sharing, collaboration, and effective voice and data communications the building blocks of our mobile culture.
  • Prepackaged, role-based, industry-specific solutions that can reduce deployment times and risk.
  • IBM POS systems that drive the store operations of over 60% of the top 100 consumer-facing businesses worldwide.
  • Financing options that spread upfront project costs to better align expenditure to business benefit.

The benefits
Drive revenue. Control costs. Improve profitability.
TotalStore capabilities are designed to support current emerging technologies as well as store infrastructure requirements. The solution can be tailored to fit your unique business needs. Specific offerings include:
  • Personal Shopping Assistant—cart-mounted Web tablet with personalized information and services delivered to the shopper, specific to their location.
  • Guided Selling—brings together manufacturer data, consumer report material and best-fit analysis for product comparison and usage scenarios.
  • POS Refresh—enables a differentiating store experience through a refresh of hardware components that can be enhanced with software and services.
  • Self Checkout—new models and lane design to make shopper-driven checkout faster and easier.
  • Shopper-Driven Kiosk—a compact, cost-effective solution for consumer and employee use.
  • Loss prevention, including:
    • Digital video security
    • Optical recognition
  • RFID display management—combined with Advanced Inventory Execution solution (AIE), moves the paradigm of SKU level management to item, piece or unit level management.
  • Store workplaces, including:
    • Store management dashboard
    • Employee access

The approach
IBM helps Circuit City connect
Circuit City believed that a new technology initiative, a vital part of its “Store of Tomorrow” revitalization effort, would move store systems from customized, proprietary systems to a system based upon open standards. This advanced technology could help Circuit City adopt leading practices, improve customer satisfaction and its competitive position.

As a part of that revitalization effort, IBM Global Technology Services designed a new network infrastructure in support of the Circuit City Store of Tomorrow solution. The IBM team:
  • Analyzed current technology capabilities and determined gaps that needed to be addressed to meet future network requirements.
  • Recommended a high-level network design and created a high-level logical diagram of that network.

The new network technologies enable the rapid flow of information that facilitates order management and supports the company's pickup order fulfillment, store inventory control, product repair processing and product delivery and installation.

The financial advantage
Drive profitable growth at the store level
The portfolio of tools included in the IBM TotalStore Solution help to align your business with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure at the store level.
  • Quicker time to value—rapidly implement the right technology infrastructure to drive efficiency and improve the consumer experience. Speed future adaptation of the store environment by deploying new applications and systems more quickly, simply and intelligently.
  • Wider choice—implement the right solution at the right time to create standout services and differentiate against the competition. Take advantage of a broad ecosystem of hardware and software vendors.
  • Greater flexibility—respond quickly to customer demands, market opportunities and external threats. Bring together disparate systems within existing store environments and extend existing business logic to deliver new capabilities.

Next steps
 
Questions about this solution? Contact an IBM Retail specialist.