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Some of the key benefits of SOA retail include:

Retail organizations can consolidate applications and align processes, employees, customers, vendors, and data through shared services. This consolidation can exist even though the systems being accessed are distinctly different. Vendors could be sharing advanced receipts via a web service while customers are interacting with the website to view those advanced receipts as expected ship dates.

Retailers are realizing that in order to gain efficiencies from the supply chain all the way down to in-store operations they must integrate all of the data sources across the unique pool of applications. Retailers can then gain better knowledge and use of the data. This can lead to numerous opportunities for savings from reducing in-store pricing errors to recognizing markup or markdown opportunities quicker all at the same time delivering greater product information directly to the consumer and sales staff.

SOA Retail will support a greater customer centric environment and drive a change in the direction of retail, from a multi-channel methodology to cross-channel where the focus is on the customer and not just the sales channel. It will give us a better understanding of how our customer is and how and when they are buying. Imagine if a customer could place an order on the web and return it in any store with immediate lookup and validation. Imagine placing an order in the store and having it delivered via the warehouse or another store in another state the same day. Customers are starting to expect these features and business must adapt to such conditions to stay viable.

Many retails have successfully built a multi-channel infrastructure but now find themselves with inconsistent polices across the channels. This lack of a holistic view builds a wall between customer expectation and reality. Promotions are a perfect example of this drawback. A customer see’s an item on sale on the web but can’t purchase it at the store due to the interoperability between these systems. SOA Retail bridges this gap and extends the past investment into IT solutions while extended the benefit and functionality of modern solutions. 

It is important to understand the SOA Retail is not a magic pill and it takes time and commitment to integrate all of the disparate systems but at its core, SOA retail is simply a response to a growing challenge: Retail business requirements are changing at an accelerating rate, and those changes simply cannot be accommodated with traditional IT and applications structures. Retailers today require a new level of agility both in process definitions and in how various processes interact with each other. That agility, and its application to business processes, is at the future of retail.