One of the things that motivate us here at getchee is our view that store development professionals in emerging markets really lack some of the high value tools and data that retailers use extensively in North America and Europe. Many other aspects of enterprise operations — from accounting, to production management, to supply chain, to human resources — have undergone significant transformation in recent decades as software solutions have brought changes to these business processes.
As a retailer, you’re probably used to using surveys as a means to understanding customer behavior. Traditionally, once you get the data, you might start working in excel or some other statistical software, cranking out brilliant correlations or percentage checks.
In a speech titled, The Digital Earth: Understanding our planet in the 21st century, Vice President Al Gore made this statement: “The hardest part of taking advantage of this flood of geo-spatial information will be making sense of it – by turning raw data into understandable information.” What Al Gore recognized back in 1998, was that while GIS was becoming more and more rich in terms of information, how businesses distill value from it was still unclear. Read the rest of this entry »
CEO Bruce Berkman discusses some of the big new challenges facing retailers and mall operators in China, and some of the possible solutions.