Digitalization of tele-stores

2024: Alexander Afanasyev: on digitalization, import independence and the peculiarities of building effective IT structures

Alexander Afanasyev - expert in the development and optimization of IT systems, director of digital transformation at LEOMAX, head of the committee for digitalization of retail and e-commerce of the Association for Digital Development of the Krasnodar Territory - February 5, 2024 spoke about digitalization, import independence and the peculiarities of building effective IT structures.

The key tasks of digitalization or why everyone talks about the figure

Digitalization is heard today in any area: it is talked about in business, public administration, finance and even in sports. What is the essence of this process and what tasks will it help to solve?

Immersing yourself in this topic, it is important to distinguish digitalization from automation. In fact, these are various stages of business development. Automation is usually understood as the initial introduction of computer technology instead of manually performing certain operations. But digitalization is a deeper process, which implies the use of digital formats that allow you to move on to work with a deeper analysis of indicators. In fact, these are two close concepts. But if automation only helps to simplify and speed up business processes at the initial stages of development, then digitalization is designed to create new points of management and business optimization.

What tasks digitalization solves

Scale your business quickly. The introduction of digital technologies eliminates the human factor as much as possible from the process of forecasting and analysis on the one hand and eliminates the routine on the other. With more time, reliable data and forecasts formed on the basis of reliable algorithms, business can make decisions much more quickly about the directions of further development, the discovery of new directions or the expansion of geography.

Increasing competitiveness in the market is another task that can be easily solved using business digitalization. New technologies today help not only to study their own indicators and indicators of competitors, but also make it possible to recognize, analyze and predict consumer behavior. In this sense, the one who owns digital information owns the world.

Reducing the cost of the final product is one of the main tasks of introducing digital technologies, and they do an excellent job with it. Among the main digital tools that help reduce costs, and, accordingly, cost, are correct load distribution, forward planning, resource control and continuous monitoring of the timing and quality of tasks for each of the departments. Moreover, this works equally well in any business, including small companies and large industrial production.

System integration and error reduction. The expert gave an example: as the Chief information officer of OFFPRICE, Alexander Afanasyev managed to develop and implement a package of information systems, which made it possible to reduce the work of users into a single system, which made it possible to reduce the number of errors, structure and minimize improvements, increase the efficiency of the man-hour and employee loyalty to the company.

New opportunities for business development by freeing up the human resource, switching from routine to creative solutions. Properly implemented digitalization allows you to significantly change the mood and motivation of the team. Employees, part of the routine functionality of which has been transferred to technologies, have more time and energy to develop new ideas and strategies, which, with the right approach to considering, evaluating and implementing new ideas, can lead to the introduction of fundamentally new approaches and directions.

Improving business efficiency through digitalization and new data exchange technologies. For example, being a service station at Sportmaster, Alexander Afanasyev managed to introduce new data exchange systems between ESB systems (data bus), which made it possible to obtain an average integration time of about 5 seconds even between systems located 9000 km from each other. This made it possible to zero integration errors in the operating loop, which were dozens per week on all 200 systems. In addition, the accumulation and analysis of digital data on the activities of the company and its divisions allows not only to identify the pains and bottlenecks of each of the stages and divisions, but also to predict the effectiveness, cost and financial benefits of certain changes.

The main results of business digitalization:

• faster movement and processing of information within the company,
• simplification of management decisions and improvement of their accuracy,
• creation of new directions, sales channels and improvement of service level for customers,
• elimination of human factors and errors in routine operations,
• reducing the cost of the product and operations,
• Scale your business quickly and efficiently
• opportunities for operational analytics and forward-looking development planning.

All these components allow not only to increase the efficiency of business and production in the shortest possible time, but also help to reduce costs, predict new stages of development, reduce or help to anticipate risks and make management decisions based on objective statistics. That is why digitalization today is the main topic for all industries and business scales.

The necessary conditions for effective digitalization

In order to be able to successfully implement all the stages of business digitalization and actually increase its efficiency, it is necessary to form conditions for a number of solutions:

• Attract an IT expert, an IT architect.
  

If you do not attract an expert, then the cost and timing of digitalization multiply increase, and the result may not be achieved at all. There are few high-class experts who can solve the difficult problems of large-scale digitalization on the market. If it is not certain that there is a specialist in the staff who has exhaustive competence, it is better to hire an IT expert as a service in the market. Even with the high cost of services, attracting an IT architect will cost less than mistakes that can be made without it.

• Own or. cloudy DPC
  

Each of these solutions has pros and cons. Own data center usually comes out a little cheaper in the horizon of 5-7 years, although often due to a decrease in quality and safety. The owner of his own data center regularly incurs CAPEX the cost of purchasing and updating equipment, as well as paying for its maintenance and the work of system administrators.
The cloud center, on the contrary, allows you to incur regular OPEX costs without taking money out of circulation, but here you need to understand and get used to the fact that your data does not lie on your territory.
Ideally, it is better to create hybrid solutions. For example, OFFPRICE built a hybrid cloud from scratch with an availability level of 99.98%. LIME and WHEELS have stepped from only their proprietary data center to the cloud, significantly increasing its scalability and providing new opportunities for the business.

• Development and/or implementation team.
  

In this industry, Alexander Afanasyev recommends keeping key competencies in the staff of the company, and if they are not there, then look for and raise their specialists. This work, of course, can be given to outsiders, but outsiders must be qualitatively managed, for this the company must have its own competent employees.
It is important to have all the roles in the development team: developers, analysts, testers. "For example, in the company WHEELS DAROM, we had a 1C development team, the core of which was in the state, in addition to them there were contractors for outsiders and outstaff, which allows solving large-scale problems in a shorter time frame," the expert noted.

• External contractors, both expert and working hands.
  

External experts will make it possible to prevent mistakes and not lose time and money. External work hands will help to quickly scale the team when it is in demand.

For example, in the company WHEEL DAROM, we began to attract external experts for the implementation of specific tasks, which made it possible to implement projects that stood for years. And external working hands made it possible to scale the resource when necessary, - said Alexander Afanasyev.

Challenges of sanctions restrictions: the struggle for import independence?

Imported IT products can be divided into two large classes of systems: fundamental and business-specific. Fundamental IT products include, for example, operating system Windows an office suite Microsoft Office,,. DBMS MS SQL Server Oracle

We have successfully embarked on the path import substitution of fundamental systems. For example, they successfully implement Astra Linux instead of Windows, a package My Office instead of Microsoft Office, DBMS PostgreSQL instead of MS SQL and Oracle. However, the level of maturity of domestic solutions in terms of a set of functionality, potential for scaling, usability still lags behind industry leaders. For this reason, the business is looking for an opportunity to take advantage of parallel imports while domestic solutions are experiencing rapid development, - said the director of digital transformation at LEOMAX.

Business-specific systems, which include SAP, Oracle EBS, Microsoft DAX and many other solutions, are quite subject to import substitution, here it is possible to switch to Russian solutions based on 1C, for example, or develop your own software.

It is important to understand that we need to deal not only with import substitution, but also with import dependence. For example, the AmericanCisco you can use equipment instead of network equipment. the Chinese Huawei The same goes for server solutions.

The specifics of tele-stores regarding offline and online retail, including in terms of building, supporting and developing an IT system:

• There are no retail stores, for this reason there is no need to maintain a large number of geographically distributed points, which significantly reduces costs.
• The store itself manages demand as the customer acquires what appears on the air. This means that there is no big problem with hung runoff in warehouses.
• A limited audience that is difficult to scale, it is stable, so IT solutions come to the fore that allow you to raise conversion even on a stable customer base.
• Age audience, which does not allow full use of modern means of communication with customers like Telegram, Whatsapp and others.
• The company's specialists are often confused with telephone spammers when they call customers with their consent, which means that with the help of IT you have to solve problems to overcome this kind of barriers (answering machines, Oleg's assistants and others).
• The main sales channel for the tele-store is the call center. Therefore, an important IT function is to support the work of CC employees online 24/7. Recently, it has also been necessary to resolve the issue of ensuring the work of employees at a remote location, which is becoming more and more.
• Goods are delivered by couriers throughout the country, so you need to set up many integrations with courier companies, more than any online retailer.
• The channel broadcasts 24/7 live, so its own IT systems support the work of the live broadcast, these systems require constant improvement.

From the point of view of the internal device, the tele-store is more like online retail with the only difference that the main sales channel is a TV channel. However, the company in which I work also has its own brand, which is also sold on the site as a full-fledged online retailer, in addition, we trade on all marketplaces, - explained Alexander Afanasyev.

If we talk about the vector of development of tele-stores, then in the future this type of sales, according to the expert, will completely merge with online retailers and cease to differ from them, since the presentation of their goods on YouTube in the format of video content is completely identical to the format of the tele-store.

See also

• Tele-stores in Russia