TAdviser SummIT. Best IT practices in Russia 2025 ": IT in Retail section

It is necessary to start small

Lowcode helps the retailer automate business processes. The first steps in this direction in Lamoda were made in 2020 on the Microsoft Power Platform. Here, from scratch and without any experience, we created a number of applications to automate the simplest scenarios. So there was an application for booking parking and chats in the messenger for birthday greetings. It was even possible to close several integration scenarios between systems.

Taking into account the demand for developers in the covid year, interest in the platform only grew, because it closed the needs of automation without development. Automation tasks, dusted for months, or even years in the backlog, suddenly began to be performed.

Stanislav Gotz, Director of Business Applications and Platforms, Lamoda

The prospects were inspiring, so the company decided to create a competence center in low-cost development. The goal of such a center was not only to develop solutions, but also to popularize the platform inside Lamoda for connecting advanced users to automation.

The top-level solutions that we made on the Microsoft Power Platform can be divided into 2 types: applications with a user interface and a pure backend for integrations between systems, the speaker explains. - There were very few platforms in the domestic market that would successfully cope with both tasks.

Low-cost platforms, which are monoliths on which the processes are configured, were not considered here at all. We were looking for a solution on which you can create really isolated applications from each other both in terms of data, users, roles and powers, and in terms of computing power, infrastructure.

We began to implement integrations between systems and automate processes on it. We started with HR processes. In two years, we managed to automate a fairly large number of HR processes, I can say this with pride. In addition, we began to receive data on the basis of which decisions can be made, says Stanislav Gotz.

Low-cost already allows you to automate a number of simple processes in delivery and in stock. Nevertheless, any solution put into operation requires not only the provision of an internal center of expertise, but also confidence that such a center is stable: employees are interchangeable, there is no bus factor, the transfer of knowledge and documentation is organized.

We need to make sure that the running applications and the platform itself as a whole have a sufficient level of fault tolerance to ensure the necessary level of service continuity. It is worth building and ensuring user support processes, as well as allocating resources to manage changes in running processes. Often all this is forgotten, and then the primary effect of low-cost development can decrease significantly.

Now HoReCa is going through an interesting period, says the speaker. - Someone calls it complex, and someone - crisis. In fact, this is a period of opportunity.

Nikolay Galkin, Director of the Information Technology Department, "Coffeemania"

We focused only on what can be controlled and what will have the maximum effect. It is important to understand that we are considering a comprehensive solution for the entire network, and not for an individual restaurant, the speaker adds.

The requirements for the system were simple: it must work with big data, integrating it from many sources. I wanted the solution to have centralized management, while it could be flexibly scaled throughout the company. To be implemented quickly, and, of course, to ensure security and delineation of access rights.

The system was developed in 3 stages. First, they implemented DWH and a BI system, saturated them with data, and then began to provide analytical reports, "says Nikolai Galkin. - Now we are engaged in piloting and soon we will transfer analytics using AI to combat operation.

Big data analytics is another tool that helps the restaurant business adapt to today's challenges. Among the implementation effects are a reduction in PHY costs, a decrease in write-offs and costs by 23%, an increase in procurement efficiency and decision-making speed. In addition, it was possible to improve the payback of marketing campaigns and promotions.

A data-driven decision-making culture will be a long-term driver of efficiency, "the speaker summarizes.

Such a chatbot has become one of those AI projects that really benefit, - emphasizes Nikolay Belyaev, innovation manager, VkusVill.

Nikolay Belyaev, Innovation Manager, VkusVill

Artificial intelligence from photography determines the category of the object and assigns it a freshness class. If the AI is not sure, then it transfers the object to a specialist for determination. Шаблон:Quote 'Everyone liked it, and we decided to expand this story to distribution centers, where the classes and gradations of quality are completely different, the speaker shares the details.

Nowhere in retail have we seen assistants of this format, with computer vision, - emphasizes Nikolay Belyaev.

This year's plans include training AI on seasonal products, integrating a hotline, warehouses and offline outlets, and automating a distribution center to speed up admissions and reduce scrap rates. AI confirmed its effectiveness and paid off faster than in six months. Its main advantages are in speed, scalability and complete automation of the entire chain.

Growth machine

Speech analytics is just the beginning of the journey. Our global goal is an AI sales director, "he says.

Denis Mosalev, Head of Customer Service Improvement, "ВсеИнструменты.ру"

Sales are not only calls, it is a system process. "If you only have scripts and a checklist, then you are somewhere in 2005," notes Denis Mosalev. It is necessary that scripts, a checklist, analytics, feedback and much more work as a single mechanism. But it is not enough just to listen to managers' dialogues and give ratings. To control - you need to measure. "It is important that each checklist action affects one of the key metrics within your department or within the company as a whole," suggests the speaker. "Otherwise, they will be useless. It is important to understand that when each item of the checklist is equal to some metric, then the interaction with each player within the team begins through the prism of the result. AI is good here because it can analyze a large amount of data. "

When we do not analyze the data deeply, we do not notice that the points can duplicate each other or are already executed by 100%, which means that the checklist is not needed at all, "says Denis Mosalev.

In addition, artificial intelligence can work as a coach for a manager. Moreover, perform point correction without doing streaming training. The manager no longer stands a chance of saying "I don't know," or "I can't," as the AI coach only works with him on his growth points.

Artificial intelligence, analyzing data and finding patterns of manager behavior there, can also create a profile of an individual candidate for a manager job. The S-metric allows you to approach the selection of employees in a new way: already at the selection stage, look for candidates who match the found good patterns as much as possible. As a result, not only the time to reach the planned efficiency of new employees is reduced, but also the turnover, but the share of successful managers, on the contrary, is growing.

You stop competing at the level of scripts and point improvements. Instead, you create a "growth machine" that automatically finds hidden opportunities, continuously trains the team, improves processes and turns sales into a managed source of profit growth, Denis Mosalev believes.

The introduction of AI mechanics into the company's processes was highlighted in his report by Petr Asratyan, Director of Information Technology, Simple Group of Companies. The company is an ecosystem of wine culture. "We realized that AI is now a potential driver of commercial business success and is able to improve operational processes," the speaker says, but he promises not to talk about "successful success," but about the rake that can be stepped on when introducing this technology. Analog companies should be especially careful.

Petr Asratyan, CIO, Simple Group of Companies

They are great guys, but they did not teach linear algebra and do not know what tensors are, "says Peter Asratyan. "It's all bird language for them. We introduced our first case in a week and a half, because there is an IT department, people studied in Baumank. And with the second case of scoring customers, we are still tormented. And the problem is not that there are idiots, they don't understand us, but we are smart. No. We are idiots who did not create a competence center, did not explain to people what AI mechanics are, how they work, what to expect.

The speaker suggests using a simple cheat sheet. If you are a digital company and your executives make decisions based on objective data, then just assemble an AI team - you will succeed. If, in fact, no digital transformation has occurred in your company, then take finished products and hire consultants.

And the most serious question is: does the company even want to turn from analog to digital? This entails changes in consciousness. 'It's going to hurt, revolution. It's serious. Because revolution is when estates are burned, not when balloons are launched, "warns Peter Asratyan. If the business goes for this, then it will have to launch AI evangelism and create its own strategy.

"Tape" scales RPA inside and enters the external market. Details of how this happened, according to Roman Klyukin, head of the RPA and web development team and competence center, Lenta. Since 2018, the company has been engaged in the robotization of processes, so now 8 directorates are using robots. 56 processes are robotic, in addition, the retailer has established its own competence center on this topic.

Roman Klyukin, head of the RPA and web development team and competence center, Lenta

It all started with the introduction of BluePrism software and retraining macro developers for RPA developers. Additionally, business analysts were allocated. Then I had to switch to a domestic solution, chose Primo RPA and began robotizing processes.

Things were going well, but something was missing. "There was no understanding why we are going into robotization in one case and not in the other," the speaker explains. Then they put together the entire list of functionality of all the company's systems, compared them with each other and, among other things, with the strengths and weaknesses of RPA. Revealed the uniqueness of each of the systems in the functional part compared to robots.

The appearance of RPA in the company led to a rapid increase in tasks, because everything was fast and cheap. There was no need to delve into the data structure. In fact, all automation was done on the knee. This led to the emergence of processes that did not cope with obligations, - says Roman Klyukin. "We started to have robots that were doing worse than we had hoped. And we thought: why so? As a result, they made a competence center in architecture. Developed a set of laws for our robots.

Lenta has identified clear criteria for robotization. It does not start if the operations performed by the robot cannot be rolled back (for example, submitting data to regulatory and supervisory authorities or postings to SAP). Or if the variability of changes in processes\forms\interfaces is too high.

RPA as a temporary solution (technical debt) is used to quickly launch MVP, to prepare business-critical reporting (subject to user control over interim results), to download data that is difficult to quickly obtain through the API - and so on. RPA is constantly used in routine operations that do not affect critical business processes, to automate one-time tasks involving many cycles of repetitive operations, and to prepare reports that are not critical to business.

Collect customers and teams piecemeal

We didn't understand what omni was for a long time, but then we came to understand, "he says. A real omni brand does not divide customers through channels. He collects them into one. "When each channel pulls the blanket over itself, the client freezes!," The speaker declares.

Mikhail Kudashev, Chief information officer, SOKOLOV

We began to understand that this whole system must be unified, "the speaker recalls," so that our client feels the seamless process. And here you need to understand: if everything is done on the part of IT, then this does not mean at all that you have omni.

Omnicanality is not CRM or integration. This is a philosophy both in business and in development, says Mikhail Kudashev. The client buys the goods once, and remembers the experience forever. People forget what exactly they bought, but they never forget how they felt when they bought.

For the past three years, SOKOLOV has combined retail and e-commerce. For example, in the customer's mobile application, you set up the display of orders made or purchased from retail. If the first installation of the application was carried out in the store, then the application displayed store prices so as not to scare the new client with lower online prices. Buyer authorization in the store is provided by QR code from the client's application, and not just by SMS.

"Our goal is not to sell more rings. We need the client to want to come back again and again, "the speaker sums up. Any business can sell once. But only those who see beyond one purchase and one channel can create relationships based on trust and understanding of the client.

The Detsky Mir group of companies launches new products, builds teams and analyzes their effectiveness using task flow metrics. How this is done in practice and how exactly such metrics help to statistically assess the timing of future tasks, said Georgy Khotyan, head of the systems back office development department, Detmir-Tech

Georgy Khotyan, Head of Systems Back Office, Detmir-Tech

In 2022, the content management system began to work here. This product is not easy and implies the processing of all goods that are sold not only directly in Detsky Mir stores, but also in the discounter. The system is key in the architectural landscape and integrates with a large number of other systems, such as the E-Comm platform, Supplier Portal, or Retail System.

The following year, an employee's mobile application with wide functionality and Customer Value Management System appeared. A separate small team finalizes the data collection terminal. This year they began a new project - the creation of a "motivation calculator."

All these applications are launched from scratch, you need to form commands for them, "George Khotyan outlines the details. - If you recruit one person from the market, then the creation of the team will be delayed. We decided to try differently: to recruit people to an existing team. They start working on an existing product. As soon as there are enough people, they can be divided into two teams. The old team is working on the old product, the new team is working on the new product.

The speaker considers other patterns of scaling and growing commands.

Things are obvious, but if you systematize them, it becomes easier to work, "he notes, recalling further the statement of William Thomson:" If you can measure what you are talking about and express it in numbers, then you know something about this subject. But if you can't quantify it, then your knowledge is extremely limited and unsatisfactory.

Metrics in Detmir-Tech are divided into three more parts: reliability metrics, code and development metrics, task flow metrics. The third species is least common in development, but there are many useful ones. Georgy Khotyan shows one of these metrics and explains using graphs exactly how they help track tasks and understand that things are going wrong.

The tobacco business is very narrow and "Old Believer." I will devote my report to the experiences and throwing that arose in our company after 2022, when we moved from the Azure cloud to the cloud from Yandex, "says Leonid Boev, Data & Analytics Product Owner, ITMS.

Leonid Boev, Data & Analytics Product Owner, ITMS

The problem here was identified in this way: initially everything was fast, the loading time of the report did not exceed a minute, but became slow and expensive. Why? In 2022, a global solution was used here: Microsoft Azure, calculations in Snowflake and Power BI storefronts. In 2023, when we had to move from a global solution, we followed the path of imitation and tried to repeat the architecture, already on local products: Yandex Cloud plus Greenplum and BI DataLens.

We found for ourselves that reporting when under the hood Greenplum is not quite the story, especially when BI DataLens is used for visualization. Yandex then advertised to everyone a bunch of ClickHouse and DataLens, but there was no answer to the question of the numbers, that the customer wins in this case. And that's what you won't find anywhere is the numbers. And we have compared everything and will show it, - the speaker promises.

The question to which we wanted to find out the answer is how much cheaper ClickHouse is in rubles, and not at the level of sensations, "emphasizes Leonid Boev.

What is not shown to anyone in numbers looks like this: ClickHouse is 7.5 times cheaper in terms of one open report and 12 times cheaper if you count one report successfully opened in 62 seconds or faster.

Big requirements for integrators

I will talk not only about artificial intelligence, but also about such a boring and seemingly forgotten topic as a knowledge base, - threatens Alexey Zagainov, director of industry solutions in retail and FMCG, K2Tekh.

This IT integrator has been working in the domestic market for 19 years, focusing on key industry clusters and annually implementing system-forming projects for the economy.

Alexey Zagainov, Director of Industry Solutions in Retail and FMCG, K2Tekh

A knowledge base is a repository of information organized according to some principles that belongs to a specific subject area. The problems of the classical knowledge base lie in the complex structure, excessive growth of the volume of information and its duplication. The search is difficult here, there are usually no people responsible for updating the database, and employees are not taught to use it.

Thus, the knowledge base becomes an archive of documents that is inconvenient to work with. It is easier for an employee to search for an answer elsewhere than to find the information you need among a variety of irrelevant search results. Alexey Zagainov proposed an alternative: a platform for managing corporate information and creating intelligent systems for interacting with it using LLM.

A smart knowledge base with artificial intelligence on board is capable of reducing requests to specialized employees by 30%. It was such figures that the internal project "K2Tekh" showed. You can use this database in HR departments to search the product base, quotations, contracts, reports, CRM records; in the finance department to search financial documents and statements, standards, contracts and regulations. It will be useful to lawyers, IT teams, and in production, where you need to search for process charts, quality standards, instructions, safety regulations.

The speaker gave an example from practice. The customer set the task: to create an intelligent assistant that will help employees find answers in a large number of company documents. To cope with such a task, an AI solution was introduced that works with local regulations of the division. Several LLM models were compared and the product was selected to provide correct responses in 91% of cases.

Can the retailer find millions in low-cost? Pavel Berman, Director of Business Development, Nobilis.Team suggested discussing this opportunity. This company positions itself as an expert in automating customer experience for large businesses. "In retail alone, we have made 20 large projects," he notes.

Pavel Berman, Business Development Director, Nobilis.Team

The vendor's resources are not unlimited. Every time a client wants something that the system cannot, this is a big burden on the vendor's IT team, says Pavel Berman.

These are three key points that a good integrator should have, the speaker agrees. - But when there is a choice of integrator, the client does not immediately remember about it, but chooses according to money or some disparate requirements.

How to deal with all this? Pavel Berman proposes to streamline the customer's expectations for the system and decide what will happen there: code, low-cost - and what to do with integrations. {{quote 'All you need is to understand the problems, determine if there is something on the market or not, agree with the vendor and integrator on how you will all work around the problems together, "he says and cites as an example projects on which some lessons were obtained. }}

For example, the delivery service from Cooper stores and restaurants needed to speed up data entry scenarios and improve UX convenience under high loads. To do this, a lowcode module of the dialog designer was introduced here, the work with the server was optimized (3 key requests instead of 12), and stability was ensured at 200 users at the same time. The lessons of the project are as follows: accelerating the interface means increasing conversion and productivity. Fast interfaces are the key in electronic commerce, because the user will not wait for Lowcod - this is not an alternative to code, but a gain for UX/UI tasks and scripts.

It is not always necessary to immediately translate. If you do not have strict requirements for switching to domestic software, then you may not run after everyone and see if it is possible to save what was, develop it. That's a fact. There are systems that work well, and you can develop them within the framework of your own roadmap, but without closing in your practice, without cutting off the contractor. Thus, you can calmly wait for the situation when the domestic product will catch up with your requirements, and then it will be possible to engage in transfiguration.

Divide CRM architecture by speed, not by channel. As for the low-cost code, this story is not at all about not writing code, but about delegating the initiative to business. "You should not have a" final version of CRM "- only an adaptation vector," calls Pavel Berman.

The branded superapp was presented to the audience by Igor Malyshev, Services Director, eXpress. "We initially work with large companies and understand all the difficulties that arise when implementing in corporations," he says, explaining that superapp as a whole is a single tool that allows you to organize all communication services and access to corporate applications in one shell.

Igor Malyshev, Services Director, eXpress

Corporate Superapp solves 6 key tasks. Provides tools for communication, providing each employee with access to services regardless of the device used. Forms a single information field of the company. Provides a resource for analyzing the work of users and the platform - and so on.

We provide the customer with the opportunity to make their own application and position it inside as their own tool, - explains Igor Malyshev. "We share a part of our brand. All processes related to the operation of the application, the client closes itself, which allows you to make personalized settings in terms of assemblies, security issues, and providing the end user with only certain features.

The speaker cites as an example a specific implementation at the retailer. Among the calls was the need to divide functionality between different categories of employees, difficulties with information security, a lot of communications - the client made up to 20 thousand calls every day. At the same time, most of the employees were remotely or worked in a hybrid format.

Then they started with the pilot, then completely abandoned Microsoft Teams and began the widespread use of the smartapp, scaling the solution. {{quote 'Now employees on their smartphone can safely work with corporate information, while only the application itself and the data inside it are under control, and not the entire human phone, which people usually do not like. Such a story has the best potential. If the device is lost or the employee quit, then the application is simply blocked, the speaker adds. }}

eXpress plans this year to add mobile access to corporate mail and to the internal corporate portal, give mobile access to VKS meeting rooms and internal information systems, make a new interface and file sharing as part of the superappa ecosystem. In addition, there will be managed workplaces with the necessary set of ICs, access and restrictions.

During the break and at the end of the conference, the participants talked informally, and also had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the solutions and services of IT suppliers at the stands deployed in the event hall.