Digitalization of retail. TAdviser 2024 review

In the climate of economic uncertainty and declining purchasing power, the population in stores "hunted" for discounts and low prices, and retailers leaned on new technologies. While the development of AI influenced sales and loyalty management, and IoT decided the fate of inventory management and logistics, call centers were supplanted by virtual assistants.

Experts from digitalization leaders and large retailers spoke about the ongoing transformation of the TAdviser market.

2023 was the year for retail companies to revise the goals and long-term strategies for the development of IT, active import substitution and new opportunities for Russian suppliers of IT solutions. If in 2022 retail companies rushed to change the accounting ERP systems, because they store all the financial statements of the organization, in fact - all the money, then in 2023 the turn reached the process-oriented systems BPM, CRM, SRM. More than half of Russian retailers increased budgets for the development of IT infrastructure in 2023.

In 2024, the priority IT tasks for retail companies are to support new business areas, for example, the opening of hard discounters or the launch of STM, the development of e-commerce channels, solutions for creating digital counterparts of supply chains. In addition, companies are forced to answer several challenges at once: the need for quick import substitution and competent work to find and retain personnel.

The focus is on the quality of management of the retail network as a whole. The effectiveness of commodity movement, logistics and relations with suppliers is important. Those IT systems that work to solve these problems, taking into account the specifics of a particular segment, are relevant.

The market is interested in an integrated approach, when the IT infrastructure is developed with the help of IT providers that provide a pool of integrated software products, a wide range of cash registers, service and technical support services.

The new rating of the largest IT suppliers in retail at the end of 2023 gathered 60 participants - vendors and integrators. The leader was Softline with revenue exceeding 27 billion rubles. The top five also included companies such as Evotor, ATOL, CSI and 1C-Rarus.

The total revenue of all participants in the rating amounted to almost 90 billion rubles.

In addition to the overall rating, TAdviser has collected a separate rating of vendors whose products are most actively implemented by retailers. This rating was headed by Evotor. The top three also included CSI and the Digital Economy League.

The consensus of the developers (participants in the review) on the issue of import substitution is as follows: the processes associated with this must be assessed as "difficult." However, this applies not only to the subject area.

Two serious factors significantly complicated the processes of switching to domestic software: an extremely short time and a noticeable shortage of qualified specialists. If the second problem was solved by a strong increase in the cost of automation projects and the involvement of new specialists in the IT industry, then the reduction in the timing of projects led to more significant consequences.

The main technological trends that experts interviewed by TAdviser speak about: the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, the Internet of things, computer vision, solutions to counter cyber threats, as well as the development of retailers' own IT competencies.

AI has become increasingly important. Simple tools such as chatbots and RPA have already become standard, and more complex solutions based on machine learning and neural networks are gradually being introduced into the operations of retail companies. In the future, AI will be used for forecasting, creating digital assistants, processing OSA signals, etc.

As of July 2024, the TAdviser database contains information on more than 8.6 thousand. IT projects carried out in retail companies. Among the different classes of IT solutions, these enterprises most often implement ERP and CRM systems. These two classes account for about 2.5 thousand of all implemented projects in this industry. Data on other classes of systems are shown in the diagram below.