Retail Asia welcomes Aditya Utama at the ‘Customers take center stage’ virtual round table

SAP’s retail industry business architect led the discussion on the importance of customer experience in today’s retail platform.

Aditya Utama specialises in the retail and consumer products industry, with more than ten years of consulting experience, delivering best practices in business processes for the supply chain. 

Leading in customer engagement that assesses strategic objectives, innovation scenarios, and key improvement opportunities, his previous experiences include focusing on leading end-to-end deal execution, along with the sales team, in orchestrating the right solutions for the customers.

As one of the speakers in the recently concluded Customers take center stage: Using innovation to grow your business virtual roundtable, the gym buff and book lover shared some of his thoughts on the changing roles of stores especially during their transition to digital transformation, the new consumer behaviours as a result of the pandemic, and the demand and supply challenges during the crisis.

What's your advice to retail stores that are starting their journey towards digitisation amidst the COVID-19 pandemic? What about those that have already started their digital transformation?

Most of the retailers today are focusing on e-commerce channels or omni-channel strategies for digital transformation. However, it’s not just about operating different channels, but it’s about getting the right product at the right time for the customer. Meanwhile, for those who already started their digital transformation, processing and consuming data to make it work across functions are becoming more important than ever. 

Offline stores are still as important as it was before the pandemic, but changing the store’s role is what’s more important as part of the digital transformation, such as the use of barcodes to get product information, equipping the store staff with tools to do client-telling for the consumer, etc.

What are the trends that you have observed in Asia-Pacific’s retail industry last year?

I think that there will be a decrease in sales due to the lockdown, with many retailers not yet ready to incorporate e-commerce from the omni-channel strategy perspective. Also, third party marketplace is the go-to platform for retailers that are not ready for their own e-commerce channel, with delivery to the last-mile (direct to customer house) required in every business

Meanwhile, the shift to healthy lives has changed customer behaviour, with the increase of sales in specific categories, such as “gym at home”. Also, demand for bicycles has risen as it is risky to travel in public transport. What’s more, even fresh food for “cook at home” rather than eating or ordering from restaurant / fast food services have increased in sales.

Which/Who would play a significant role(s) in changing the prevailing retail landscape?

I think that the stakeholders and the management who will need to decide the investment in the digital transformation including channel activation, channel improvement, and data sharing across the functions are the ones who will play a dominant role in this landscape. 

As a Retail Industry Business Architect for Southeast Asia, how can you develop a successful supply chain amidst the crisis? 

When we talk about the crisis today, we are referring to the demand and supply as well as customer delivery. I do believe that a lot of point-to-point delivery—including the last mile—can be solved, as we do have a lot of logistics companies and many online deliveries using different types of available vehicles.

But demand and supply has been becoming a major challenge these days, with high demands on some specific categories from last year’s pandemic slowing down today as supply has been improved upon (ports are opening, export and import are running). Also, the new normal has been allowing people to go to work and do their usual daily activities, so many of these in-demand categories are now decreasing in scope.

To make it better, retailers need to focus on the planning tools that include merchandise planning, allocation planning, and even promotions planning correctly placed with data that we can gather from the developing trends. 

The trend that we need to take a look at today, when doing the planning or forecasting, is not just from high demand trends, but also what the customer wants to search/do/buy. Retailers need to start listening in so they can do all these end-to-end retail planning for the supply chain to run smoothly.

How has the pandemic affected the supply chain integration, locally and globally?

Due to the pandemic, most of the retailers in the country have started to look to more local suppliers rather than global suppliers due to the port closing or stricter importing process regulation. Moreover, many local startups are opened in the country to help supply directly to retailers or customers.

Demand data sharing to the supplier such as product improvement, product availability, as well as the new product development—either local or global suppliers—are required and have become important.

What’s more, the shift to other brands due to the lack of supply from the pandemic situation had become a challenge for some brand owners.