Retail Re-revolution

Overcrowded malls, long queues for billing, waiting to park the vehicle have become a common experience for customers. To make shopping a better experience for the customers the shopping malls have come up with several offers to lure the customers to shop on weekdays in order to avoid overcrowding on the weekends. But this has also not solved the purpose. It goes back to the demand-supply theory – the malls are less and the customers are far too many. Having said this, a major chunk of the local kirana/ mom-n-pop stores which fall under the so called ‘unorganized retail’ category bear the brunt of it all in terms of reduced sales, even lower margins. The retailers under the unorganized retail type are able to offer services like home delivery, credit period, delivery of products on a need basis, option of returning the stuff back to the retailer in case it is not good, etc. In spite of the fact that they offer more non-tangible benefits, they are still loosing ground to organized retailers.

Turning around their business has become the need of the hour for the retailers. For this, they are taking several steps:

• Give a longer credit period
• Sell a price lower than the MRP (maximum retail price) thus taking a cut on their margins
• Increased frequency on home delivery of products on need basis
• Give the whole customer experience a personal touch – giving sweets, gifts to customers during the time of festivals
• Take orders on the phone
• Some have also gone to the extent of hosting their websites in order to promote the products and offer of the day

The above steps have slowed the ground losing process for these mom-n-pop stores. The battle may have been won but the war is not over yet.

According to a McKinsey report published in September 2008, called 'The Great Indian Bazaar: Organized Retail Comes of Age in India', organized retail in India is expected to increase from 5% of the total market in 2008 to (14-18)% of the total retail market and reach US$ 450billion by 2015.

One thing still favoring the mom-n-pop retailers in India is government regulations that create high entry barriers for the bigger retailers

• Land market regulations: Unclear land titles and red tape creates barriers to entry and business turnover
• FDI restrictions: Reduce competitive intensity among domestic players

One approach to deal with the arising situation is as under:

The mom-n-pop/ kirana stores need to come together and form an association within a shopping area/ community. For example retailers 1, 2, 3 and 4 decide to form a cartel and work together on improving sales for each other.  Retailer ‘1’ sells readymade garments, retailer ‘2’ has a restaurant, retailer ‘3’ sells groceries and retailer ‘4’ has a snacks cart. Now in a hypothetical situation where in say a customer goes to buy readymade garments shops for say Rs. 5000/- and the retailer gives him a shopping voucher worth Rs. 250/- which he can redeem at the restaurant owned by retailer ‘2’ provided his bill amount is in excess of Rs. 1000/-. Now in case the bill amount is more than Rs. 1000/- at the restaurant, the customer gets a voucher worth Rs. 50/- which he can redeem at the groceries store provided he shops for Rs. 500/- or more. Now in case the bill amount is in excess of Rs. 500/- the customer gets a shopping voucher worth Rs. 20/- which he can use at the snack cart provided his bill is more than Rs. 100/-. The sharing mechanisms should be worked around in a manner where in all the ones involved in the association can benefit out of it.

Another approach to deal with the above mentioned situation is:

The mom-n-pop/ kirana stores selling similar stuff but located in different localities need to come together and form an association. For example retailer A, B, C and D are in similar business of selling readymade garments but are located in non-competing areas. They can come together and can engage in bulk sourcing from the supplier. Since the city of delivery is the same there will not be any extra transportation cost involved as well. This will give the retailers an opportunity to play around with margins.

Only an ‘out of the box’ thinking will be able to revive the mom-n-pop/ kirana stores. They really need to act fast else face phase out or elimination by the bigger organized retailers.

Natural Language

Introduction

All of us use search engines on the internet. Typically we type key word or multiple words and the search engine comes back with the ‘search results’ page with the links. Just imagine if one types in the natural language, the way we speak, and the search engine comes back with specific summary of all the relevant information.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural-language processing (NLP) is an area of artificial intelligence research that attempts to reproduce the human interpretation of language. NLP methodologies and techniques assume that the patterns in grammar and the conceptual relationships between words in language can be articulated scientifically. The ultimate goal of NLP is to determine a system of symbols, relations, and conceptual information that can be used by computer logic to implement artificial language interpretation.

What’s happening around?

Companies are working on the theoretical issues of computational linguistics and developing technologies such as speech processing, machine translation, universal and application-specific dialog engines, information retrieval, text mining and hypertext databases, automatic text summarization, natural language understanding and generation, etc. One key objective is to provide advanced NLP software for multiple languages and modalities exploited in business applications. Another fundamental objective is to provide the sophisticated NLP technologies required to linguistically enable human-computer interfaces.

Applications

Natural language processing provides both theory and implementations for a range of applications. In fact, any application that utilizes text is a candidate for NLP. The most frequent applications utilizing NLP include the following:

• Information Retrieval (IR) – Provides a list of potentially relevant documents in response to a user’s query
• Information Extraction (IE) – Focuses on recognition, tagging and extraction into a structured representation, certain key elements of information, e.g. persons, companies, locations, organizations, from large collections of text. These extractions can then be utilized for a range of applications including question-answering, visualization, and data mining
• Question-Answering – Provides the user with either just the text of the answer itself or answer-providing passages
• Summarization – Can empower an implementation that reduces a larger text into a shorter, yet richly constituted abbreviated narrative representation of the original document
• Machine Translation – Various levels of NLP have been utilized in MT systems, ranging from the ‘word-based’ approach to applications that include higher levels of analysis

How will search engines make money?

Various business models emerge:

• More specific and focused advertisements on the searched pages
• Database of users based on age group, gender, location, preferences, etc. – A huge source of data that could potentially be a gold mine for market/ consumer research and tracking the changing/ evolving preferences of people
• Search itself could become paid in certain cases
• Bundle the text platform with voice recognition, streaming media, voice recognition & understanding emotions, biometric, etc.
• Search within emails – information from one cloud made available at a cost
• Enterprise content management – more a B2B approach

Limitations

The greatest challenge to NLP is representing a sentence or group of concepts with absolute precision. The realities of computer software and hardware limitation make this challenge nearly insurmountable. The realistic amount of data necessary to perform NLP at the human level requires a memory space and processing capacity that is beyond even the most powerful computer processors.

Conclusion

While NLP is a relatively recent area of research and application, as compared to other information technology approaches, there have been sufficient successes to date that suggest that NLP-based information access technologies will continue to be a major area of research and development in information systems now and far into the future.

Project Economy

Introduction

There was a time when employees used to work in the organization to be better known and recognized by the top management. Today, some top employees have never stepped foot in corporate headquarters, and the executives who manage them would not recognize them if they passed on the street.

Welcome to the strange new world of project-based work, where independent professionals coalesce around a design challenge or product launch and disband once the work is done.

Project work is not new: A classic example of would be movie industry where in people from diverse fields come together, work on a project, deliver it and the value add is significant. Perhaps the only time everyone meets together is at the premier of the movie. Another example is a case of Indian Premiere League (IPL).

Employees today look at the career path as something they own. They are mobile in their careers, and want education and mentoring. They look to spend certain period of time in a place and move on. In the bigger picture, employees do not have the same loyalty towards employers as did workers of their parents' generation.

What is Project Economy?

“Project Economy” refers to usually temporary, extraordinarily collaborative and often global processes of value creation. In a narrower sense is equivalent to cooperative value creation in organizationally and legally independent temporary projects. For many companies this type of cooperation is in many cases the most efficient way of doing business today. This is because product life cycles have shortened further; the breadth and depth of the knowledge necessary for developing and marketing successful products have increased rapidly; successful products are increasingly the result of convergence between differing fields of technology and knowledge; and many companies and research institutes are even more strongly specialized than they were in early 2000s.

Consequently these companies collaborate ever more frequently on joint projects – delegate specialized employees or parts of their organization to these projects, invest capital or put their knowledge and networks at their disposal. In this way, companies can respond flexibly to the considerably higher demands on knowledge and rapidity in the global markets while sharing the costs and risks. This is often – but by no means always – their key to success.

Open innovation processes is likely to help in conquering newer markets – The competition for cutting-edge technology and knowledge-intensive services in the market is increasing. Today collaborative innovation, intelligent sharing, exchanging of knowledge and intellectual property have become critical factors for success. A project economy approach to work is likely to prove efficient especially in the early, innovative and thus particularly knowledge-intensive phases of value creation.

Drivers of Project Economy

• Aging – With a significant proportion of global population aging and reaching their retirement age there is an increasing pressure on individuals to ensure their social security,. As such a longer work life is required.
• Growing networking in business – The shrinking of the world due to the internet, affordable global travel and predominance of world media has made the world smaller. Transnational companies are increasingly gaining importance in this scenario with their services across borders, more international coordination and deregulation of market at the national level
• Globalization – From a global standpoint the world is becoming flatter. Open sourcing and growing services offshoring are driving companies towards cooperation leading to competition for brains globally.
• Opening of work and society – Process virtualization in business has given individuals more flexible career paths & time management. This has significantly changed their lifestyle and family structures.
• Specialization of sources of knowledge – Fast expanding knowledge base requires specialization and necessary breadth of knowledge for successful products via cooperation
• Accelerated creation of knowledge – Rising knowledge content in successful products and diversification of costs & risks

In the Project Economy…

• Cutting-edge technologies and innovative services are likely to prosper – Exchange of information in communities of practice will translate into project ideas; spin-offs of universities and companies are the avant-garde of the project economy
• Legal consulting will become integral to value-creation – Safeguarding contributions and the distribution of profits is crucial
• Brands are likely to become even more important – Short-lived projects sell under licenses of established brands, trusted provider in the internet economy
• Much will be demanded of employees – Frequently changing co-workers, locations and tasks; volatile demands on professional skills

Towards Project Economy - Implications for companies

§ Quickly responding to consumers’ preferences – Innovations will become more demand-driven, especially in an ageing society and self-reliant consumers (in a buyers’ market) will voice their preferences and wishes more clearly

§ Open the internal innovation process – Consumers should become an integral part of the innovation process, particularly in services; companies outsourcing parts of their innovation process & encouraging individuals to participate i.e. involve client to keep him

§ More tailor-made goods and services – Flexible production structures, lower barriers to entry and encourage dissatisfied consumers to become producers, which in turn will change their role as consumers

§ High work-intensity fosters demand for ‘convenience services’ – More personal & family tasks will be outsourced. A flexible and innovative project economy based service sector will provide the opportunities (family shopper) and offer the less skilled a chance

§ Ageing society will boost the third sector – Not everyone will be able to afford the services provided by the market, neighborhood-networks and non-profit organizations will become important alternative providers, especially for services

§ Financial services for workers in the project economy – The project economy would mean frequent changes between periods of employment, periods of in-between projects and periods of learning & training and banks will have to offer products to compensate for the resulting unsteady income flow

Scenarios

• Flexible co-regulation clears the way to new markets – Specialized companies hit these markets via project co-operations (on the basis of traditional value creation)
• Flexible regulation and an active society would pave the way to new markets – Corporations stick with familiar structures/markets, little co-operation, if so only with ‘old acquaintances’
• Regulation is inflexible, does not keep up with economic dynamics (or is governed by concerted lobbying) – Entrepreneurial initiative is a risky adventure here. Still, it is plentiful and mostly put into action in co-operation
• Inflexible, obsolete regulation and struggle for competence among the political parties are blocking entrepreneurial initiative and social engagement – Few corporate co-operations, a lot of protection of vested interests

Road Ahead…

The advantages of a project-based workforce are clear and compelling: an ability to adapt quickly to changing competitive circumstances without an obsolete business unit's drag on productivity, performance and profits. Large, bureaucratic companies as we have known them will cease to exist. They will be replaced by smaller, more fluid versions of their former selves, staffed by professional nomads who migrate to wherever the employment market promises the greatest personal and financial return.

The onus now is on employers. If they can begin to think like the new generation of employees, they will discover that there are far more imaginative ways for the work to get done.