Information systems for retail companies challenges in the era of digitization

Abstract

Worldwide the retail sector is driven by a strong intra-competition of existing retailers and an inter-competition between traditional and new pure digital players. The challenges for retail companies can be differentiated into a business and an application system (architecture) perspective. Based on a domain-oriented architecture that covers all steps of value creation through to the customer, the potential influence of digitization on the tasks of Retail Information Systems are examined from five different perspectives. The domain perspective is divided into five levels: master data, technical processes, value based processes, administrative processes and decision oriented tasks. The technical challenges of application systems are not least characterized by the complexity of such architectures. The traditional mass data problem in retail is increasing in times of big data and several different omni-channel-scenarios. This leads towards really large enterprise systems, which require an understanding of the main challenges in the future. So, that the IT manager can gain and keep the flexibility and the software maintenance of applications (and the application architecture).