Retail Business
The business segment that retails consumer goods such as clothing, footwear, food, home furnishings, books and videos, toys, housewares and more.

Vertical Overview
Retail is the second-largest industry in the United States both in the number of establishments and number of employees. Per capita consumer spending is expected to reach $26,000 by 2011.

The economy and changing trends in consumerism have changed the retailing business from what it was a decade ago. Customers have replaced technology as the driving force for change. Now it is imperative to find out what customers want, how they want to receive it, what they want to pay for it, and when they want to get it. This new approach challenges retailers to meet consumers' expectations of more control, better information, and versatile communication capabilities.

Today, retailing is seen as a new paradigm in the supply chain where business efficiency is achieved by streamlining procurement, distribution, marketing, selling, and support processes. With collaboration at each step in the retail process, from product design and development, through manufacturing and sales, retailers can streamline business processes, implement new cost efficiencies, and benefit from access to a wider combined customer base.

Business Challenges
The new face of a ‘Consumer’ economy has resulted in extraordinary growth in the retailing business but, at the same time, posed many challenges as retailers must provide quality goods and services at the cheapest rates and be ever responsive to changes in demands.

Consumer-centric Today's consumers have more choices than ever before. This can make them demanding—they want what they want, when they want it. The challenge for retailers is to focus on meeting a customer’s demands by offering a personalized service.

Operational Efficiencies
Success in the current retail market depends on how well retailers respond to the demands of the marketplace. To react with speed, it is important for a retailer to hone their competitive edge by improving operational efficiencies in procurement, display, distribution and support.

Retaining customers
Turning customers into loyal customers is the next biggest challenge. Successful retailers will use sales campaigns and loyalty programs to attract customers back again and again.

Technology sophistication
Lack of integration between the storefront and back office will impact on business, adding costs to inventory management. Retailers lose their competitive advantage by holding excess stock for a product that is not in demand and with delays for goods in demand.

Solution Approach
The dynamic nature of today’s business with its fast pace of change drives enterprises to work hard to maintain a competitive edge. Enterprises can easily run short of time to build and deploy new solutions or re-engineer existing systems to support their critical business needs, while discarding the legacy systems that become prohibitively expensive. To answer such formidable business challenges, SourceEdge focuses on the use of Solution Blueprints and a Rapid Application Development oriented model to help build and deliver a solution to clients in the quickest time.

The unique features of our Solution Blueprint Model suit today’s business needs:

• Platform independent
• Highly flexible, scalable, robust architecture
• Vertical centric business solution
• Model once and deploy anywhere
• Reduced development costs
• Reduced maintenance cost and less dependency
  
  

Retailers need a sophisticated business system which includes Planning, Procurement, Distributions, Merchandising, Operating and Analyzing products and services and caters for the complex retailing business. An integrated, end-to-end Point-Of-Sale solution will ease retailing operations and enable a fully connected system to run that is open to every employee.

Using new Service Oriented Architecture specifications, the SourceEdge POS solution overcomes the problems of fragmented information by providing consolidated, expanded information with the flexibility a retailer today needs.



Blue print development approach

Business Requirements Analysis Process
Business analysis through Process definition and diagram, User Activities and Use cases, Collaboration and UML diagram.

Business Entities Design
Business process documentation through Application use cases, Module definition, System architecture, UML class diagram and GUI design

Application Development Automation
Business logic definition through Prototype, Automatic code generation, Proof of concept, Module design and Deployment Quality Process Automation: Business validation through System and compliance testing, Initial system integration testing, Data verification and Implementation




Business Requirement Analysis Process
This is the first phase of the solution building process, SourceEdge works in collaboration with its clients to identify the functional requirement and transforming into technical requirement. The business goal of this phase is to

• Understand the business process and define the user and their functions
• Identify the business entities
• Identify the process tasks and defining the business use cases

Business Entities Design: The output of first phase will be input of this phase, where business requirements are defined and transformed into a technical document of application use cases, modules, system design & architecture, and user interfaces.

The business goal of this phase is to

• Understand and enumerate the workflow tasks
• Define the application use case and Identification of classes
• Perform relational mapping between Identified classes
• Identify the business entities
• Prepare a UML diagram and design User Interfaces

Application Development Automation
The output of the Business Entities Design phase will be a ready framework to generate codes automatically for different modules of application. The code is generated using SourceEdge’s proprietary RAD tool and the business goal of this phase is to

• Develop the business logic
• Develop productive code and a semi-workable program
• Refine the User Interfaces
• Perform checks on transactions

Quality Process Automation
As application testing occurs at every incremental stage of design and development, when it comes to this final phase of quality verification, the process is easy to implement, test and deliver.

The business goal of this phase is to

• Evaluate the application for performance
• Quality check and automation using tools
• Fine tune
• Test and implement the system

Software Architecture
The POS uses a Microsoft .NET based solution Framework. The figure below illustrates the solution architecture for the POS Solution.



Solution Benefits
The retail solution can transform the current processes and traditional methods, benefiting retailers and customers.

• Solution Blue print addresses most of the business challenges in the initial stage and hence offers increased efficiency and higher profitability
• Flexibility to tailor the solution to match exact needs
• Ready solution framework-to-code, develop and implement
• Customer to derive rapid time to deploy and return on investment
• Cost Effective model - Model once and develop elsewhere

And whereas the business benefits include:

• A solution that is more secure and extremely productive
• Fully integrated with Finance, Supply chain and Inventory
• Complete control of the business operation
• Reduced cost of ownership
• Detailed business reporting
• Real-time data availability
  

Technology Approach
Microsoft .NET is the Microsoft strategy to connect people, information, systems, and devices through Web services. SourceEdge uses Microsoft’s agile architecture on Web services, which provides an open, standards-based way to connect systems. Retailers can use them to dramatically enhance the customer buying experience by consolidating information from existing databases and opening new channels to personalize service.

Speeding up development by using Web services to connect existing and new systems creates a competitive advantage. SourceEdge’s solution for retailers ensures

• Development based on industry-standard protocols (XML, SOAP, WSDL)
• Quick and easy development
• Integrated solutions for retail businesses
• Process Driven Development Model
• Highly flexible, scalable, robust architecture
• Automated development approach using RAD tool