The Brief – January 31 2017

Optimizing the Customer Experience with Exceptional Home Delivery: Part One — E-commerce and Profitable Delivery Challenges

By Ann Grackin

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Managing the cost and customer experience of fulfilling and delivering orders is one of the biggest challenges facing anyone doing e-commerce today. [ Read: Optimizing the Customer Experience with Exceptional Home Delivery: Part One — E-commerce and Profitable Delivery Challenges ]

In-Store Operations — The Next Big Battlefront for Retail Solutions

The Omni-channel revolution is compelling retailers to reinvent their stores, in turn opening up a new battlefront among solution providers over whose software will be running these newer store operations (such as in-store fulfillment). This battle was on full display at NRF this year. [ Read: In-Store Operations — The Next Big Battlefront for Retail Solutions ]

The Russians Are Coming?

Stealing trade secrets, patent infringements, piracy, counterfeiting and product tampering damage companies, make people ill, and deflate honest competition. And if financial and trade hacks are not enough, we now fear that our IoT devices can be hacked. Most of all, hacking/stealing trade secrets and hijacking product quality challenge the very notion of innovation, capitalism and free trade—the system that has modernized the world since the industrial revolution and catalyzed the information age. [ Read: The Russians Are Coming? ]

Blockchain Gets Real

The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) facilitates post-trade processing for over 98% of all credit derivatives worldwide (over $11 trillion). Last week, they announced (together with IBM) that DTCC is moving their credit derivatives Trade Information Warehouse (TIW) service off their legacy relational database and online transaction processing technologies and onto a distributed ledger, based on blockchain technology. That is a big deal for blockchain. [ Read: Blockchain Gets Real ]