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On our Retail expertise
The power of international collaboration: jointly introducing new offerings into the market
25 Oct, 2023
With offices all over the world, HSO has the ability to share knowledge globally. This enables us to jointly develop and implement new solutions for our clients, such as Intelligent Order Management and The Intelligent Store. With Intelligent Order Management, we have introduced a global solution to the market that supports every aspect of the customer journey.
“It always starts with a challenge that we encounter with a customer,” says Jos Otermans, Customer Engagement Manager Retail. “One of our retail clients reported that their customer satisfaction was decreasing. That was primarily because they couldn’t always fulfill orders on time, or not completely, with some items arriving late. This is very inconvenient: if a technician comes for a scheduled visit, all the necessary parts must be there. Otherwise, they cannot complete the job, and this leads to unpleasant consequences. In short, this client wanted their applications to better support the customer journey.”
Enormous potential
“For Jos and his colleagues, this was the motivation to leverage Microsoft’s Intelligent Order Management (IOM) platform. “This was quite a journey for us: two years ago, it was far from being a mature application, and even today it is still under active development. But we did see enormous potential and therefore the need to build our expertise on this application. Conversations with other HSO branches abroad led to various organizations identifying people who, like us, saw this as a white spot that Microsoft had yet to uncover.”
What is Intelligent Order Management?
Intelligent Order Management offers a real time, uniform overview of orders, inventory, and deliveries, bringing everything together into a single, integrated system. It links all information from applications that handle order processing, execution, and planning, enabling smooth coordination. This way, you can base your client promise on actual data from the transport planning, installation, and ERP systems. AI assists in data interpretation and pattern identification. Additionally, IOM closely integrates with existing ERP systems (from Microsoft, as well as SAP or Oracle, for example) and provides visibility into the entire supply chain process, end-to-end, regardless of data sources.
Building expertise
The result was the formation of an international task force around IOM. “International collaboration is much more efficient than independently building a demo environment, gaining knowledge and implementation experience, and developing marketing materials. Before implementing it for a customer, the solution has to be good enough. In the meantime, we continue enriching our knowledge, adding functionality, and helping our service lines develop their know-how, so they can build up their own expertise on the platform. More and more people are getting involved, so this could easily become a big success.”
Microsoft also plays an important role, “From the very beginning, we’ve kept closely in contact with them to share the challenges we face, along with our customers.”
The first demos are already in the hands of clients, and they have been well received. “It’s a long-term process. There’s a lot of work ahead, but the enthusiasm is already enormous.”
The Intelligent Store
Store employees spend 75% of their time in non-client centric activities. By equipping these employees with digital devices that give them constant access to relevant information, they can efficiently and accurately advise clients, enjoy their work more, and increase customer satisfaction. A combination of the Microsoft Azure Cloud, Microsoft 365, and various AI applications makes this possible. The Intelligent Store is also an offering that HSO worldwide continues to refine in collaboration with retail clients.