Adaptable and Flexible Business Continuity Solutions for Retail
Meeting the Critical Demands of the Industry Driven by the COVID-19 Pandemic
How the world purchases products is changing rapidly, and in some respects these changes are permanent. To ensure relevancy and profitability, retail businesses must seamlessly adapt to the new set of challenges and goals in front of them. This means finding creative ways to maintain organizational business continuity while reconfiguring how they can deliver quality, safe, valued-added customer experiences. Digital transformation efforts that were once viewed as a ‘nice to have’ for retail businesses are accelerating, now viewed as integral to future success.
How the world purchases products is changing rapidly, and in some respects these changes are permanent. To ensure relevancy and profitability, retail businesses must seamlessly adapt to the new set of challenges and goals in front of them. This means finding creative ways to maintain organizational business continuity while reconfiguring how they can deliver quality, safe, valued-added customer experiences. Digital transformation efforts that were once viewed as a ‘nice to have’ for retail businesses are accelerating, now viewed as integral to future success.
For some retail businesses like apparel, electronics, quick serve restaurants and others, there’s an increased customer demand for remote ordering and curbside pickup to ensure a contactless experience. Oftentimes this is integrated with a native or third-party app, where the retailer needs to effectively prioritize order submissions and pickups, then be alerted when the customer arrives. Sometimes, this service also requires support of POS devices and securely processing onsite credit card transactions. Other retail businesses who deliver ‘essential’ services and products like grocery, department, home improvement, and pharmacy are providing these services as well. In some cases, these retailers are also offering outdoor clinical services like drive up triage and viral testing, in partnership with healthcare organizations and local government authorities.
For all retailers, there’s an increased priority to access critical intelligence and analytics from business environments – like real-time or historical visitor trends across their location(s), onsite customer engagement behaviors, and inventory tracking and availability, to name a few. To augment this intelligence in more meaningful and targeted ways, its essential retailers leverage open API platforms to build a strategic digital ecosystem. On top of it all, some corporate-level retail employees have to sustain productive business operations remotely with highly populated office buildings shutdown.
To overcome any of these critical business challenges and drive innovative digital use cases, organizations require purpose-built IT networking solutions that are fast, flexible, secure, and deliver unparalleled connectivity. Extreme offers a range of network solutions that can help. Regardless of size, environment, and deployment scenario, Extreme’s curated solutions can help retail businesses adapt and scale to the unprecedented demands impacting the industry today.
Connecting and Securing Extended Networks for Outdoor Use Cases and Temporary Facilities
Retailers are expanding their services outside of the traditional physical footprints of their business sites. As mentioned above, this could include secure outdoor payment and POS device support, curbside pickup, temporary distribution centers, or even drive-up viral testing and triage. To rollout these services, IT departments must deliver secure, reliable infrastructure solutions while remaining compliant.
The network infrastructure requirements for temporary facilities and extended network deployments can differ greatly. For example, curbside payment and pickup has different network requirements compared to pop-up distribution centers.
Key Factors to Consider in Choosing the Appropriate Network Solution Include:
- Proximity of temporary deployment to standing retail facility and/or an existing communications infrastructure.
- Wi-Fi may be an option for extending connectivity to sites in close proximity of a retail store (for example, an identified curbside pickup section in a parking lot).
- For sites that are not co-located, an SD-WAN solution or branch router must be deployed in addition to the wired/wireless infrastructure within the pop-up site.
Equipment and Devices Supporting
- How will the extended site be used? What communication services are required (voice, video, data or all the above)?
- For curbside payment and pickup, what POS or inventory management devices/systems need to be supported?
Third Party Integrations
- Is there a native or third-party application to process orders, and trigger when the customer is expected to arrive at the location via GPS or geofencing?
- Is there a requirement for integration back to a main hospital or a government agency (or both)?
Speed of Deployment
- How quickly does the new site need to be up and running?
All factors require careful consideration when expanding retail services and deploying pop-up tents/temporary facilities. While speed is of the essence, upfront planning can mitigate future issues, resulting in a superior communications network infrastructure for the care and wellbeing of customer, staff, and patients (where applicable).