Retailing is undergoing many major transformations today. Retailers need to run their IT systems more efficiently and cost effectively than ever before. Major chains are expanding their presence across geographic regions and, in many cases, across national boundaries. Additionally, they are expanding into new markets that extend their brand to new product categories. Meanwhile, with the Internet having raised expectations for customer services, customers are expecting retailers to deliver a consistent experience, regardless of whether they are inside the store, phoning a call center, or at their computer. Also, as wireless technologies emerge, consumers will expect their retailers to interact with them using the new proximity-based mobile services that are on the horizon.

As retailing braces itself for change, Blue Monitor is the ideal partner to help retailing company's gains a competitive advantage. Having pioneered the 4th Generation Transformational Offshore outsourcing model, Blue Monitor is well positioned to help retailers build, renew, and extend their technology infrastructures, enabling them to focus on their core business.

We have a practice that delivers the best of both worlds: in-depth experience with retailing applications and a strong enterprise architecture foundation. As a result, we have helped retailers:

• Upgrade supply chain systems, ranging from order management to category and space management, warehouse management, logistics management, pricing and promotions, and merchandising management
• Implement new point of sale solutions that embrace new international standards and provide new flexibility for supporting new merchandising initiatives
• Implement point solutions developed by our Retail Center of Excellence. The Center of Excellence has built solution accelerators and defined implementation methodologies for multi-channel integration, GTIN/Sunrise 2005 compliance, and for Point of Sale systems migration.
• Accelerate the implementation of enterprise and customer relationship management
• Improve business intelligence effectiveness
• Wireless Point of Sales Systems

Blue Monitor knows retail, and knows how to build strong foundations that enable retailers to focus on their core business of selling products to the customer. Blue Monitor provides the assurance that retailers will have the right systems to support their growth and multi-channel development goals.

Blue Monitor Retail Solutions

Blue Monitor brings the best of both worlds to retailers: an enterprise architectural focus that enables retailers to unify their back office systems and build effective multi-channel strategies, plus the ability to drill down to the vertical and point solutions that are unique to retailing. Our retail service offerings include:

• Retail Industry Solutions: We have implemented a broad array of supply chain, merchandising, operational, and customer relationship management applications that retailers required to grow their business.
• Retail Point Solutions: The retail sector is confronted with unique challenges to integrate the customer experience, from inside the store to call centers, and the Internet. And with the emergence of wireless devices, customers will come to expect proximity-based services. Additionally, retailers are faced with unique challenges in upgrading their point-of-sale and product identification systems to support emerging global standards and new, customer-facing applications. We offer solutions that enable retailers to meet these challenges.
• Enterprise Management: Leveraging our Enterprise Consulting practice, we can build, or renew the corporate systems like Finance, Human Resources, Planning systems. We also have experience in implementation, customization and maintenance of corporate applications modules provided by leading software package vendors like SAP, Oracle, and People Soft. Our Data Warehousing practice delivers business intelligence solutions for the specialized needs of retailers and understands their concerns through experience in delivering retail-specific business intelligence solutions.

With our fourth generation offshore outsourcing, Blue Monitor can help retailers embrace 21st century competitive challenges without the disruptions normally associated with major enterprise business and system transformation.

Blue Monitor Retail Industry Solutions

Blue Monitor knows retailing. We offer a wide variety of industry solutions that touch every major facet of retail, from supply chain to the customer. Our retail industry offerings include:

• Supply Chain Management
• Merchandising
• Customer Relationship Management
• Restaurant Operations
• Wireless Point of Sales and Support

Supply Chain Management
We have implemented a broad array of supply chain-related applications for retail and restaurant chains and have in-depth experience, and have extending their value through our application management, enterprise integration, and architecture strategy consulting services.

Our supply chain offerings include:

• Vendor Management: We extend and customize vendor management systems to improve vendor information maintenance, evaluation, performance management, and supplier integration.
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• Purchasing: We integrate internal purchasing applications with other enterprise back office customer applications as well as packages from vendors such as J.D. Edwards through extensive process mapping and configuration.
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• Order Management: Our order management solutions encompass order tracing, fulfillment, receipt consolidation, reconciliation and related functions. We have developed high-volume systems for customers such as a large US based music retailer.
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• Warehouse Management: We have experience in inbound and outbound transactions that include receiving, storage, picking/packing, inventory control, order release, shipping among others. We also have implemented warehouse and distribution applications built around packages.
• Franchise Management: We maintain and deploy applications such as management of franchise histories, franchise locations, and price controls on franchisees.
• Inventory Management: We have implemented applications that integrate inventory systems with financials and warehouse management, providing full visibility down to shipping, receiving, inbound freight scheduling, and inventory deployment and picking. We have broad experience in inventory module of some of the popular packages such as Retek and JDA.

Merchandising
Getting the right product mix is crucial to retaining customer loyalty. Blue Monitor retailing experts understand the latest merchandising solutions that help retailers forecast demand by SKU, and then making sure that consumers find the right product, at the right place, at the right time, and right price.

Blue Monitor offers the following merchandising solutions:

• Category Management: We custom develop category management systems delivering valuable insights into consumer buying behavior to help plan product mix. Additionally, we have ample experience maintaining and enhancing legacy category management systems.
• Demand Forecasting: We develop and enhance sales forecasting and reporting systems that analyze customer demand for restaurant chains and retailers.
• Open-to-Buy Systems: We integrate sales and purchasing systems to provide real-time analysis of open-to-buy. With this integration, we have dramatically reduced the time necessary for data acquisition, enabling retailers to focus on analytics.
• Pricing and Promotions Management: We have built or implemented a portfolio of applications for optimizing pricing, price change implementation, and marketing planning.
• Our solutions deliver results. For instance, one of our clients now saves five days per month conducting data acquisition, enabling them to spend more time on purchasing high turn over items and price strategy.
• Space Management: Our solutions analyze financial performance, sales, and space utilization of different shelf placement options. Thanks to more effective replenishment and placement analyses, we help retailers optimize space usage to boost sales and improve the customer experience.

Customer Relationship Management
Backed by strategic relationships with Siebel and Pegasystems, our own retail CRM offerings cover all aspects of retailer/customer interaction including sales force automation, opportunity management, customer support, and a full spectrum of CRM analytics.

Additionally, we have developed special expertise in helping retailers implement customer loyalty programs. We develop, implement, and maintain systems that plan and track customer gift cards designed to encourage repeat business. Our customer loyalty program applications cover processes such as gift redemptions, credit policies, integration with POS and third party gift card services, and related back office processes.

Restaurant Operations
Our solutions drill down to the operational level, covering:

• Labor Scheduling: This application is especially crucial in the restaurant business, where labor accounts for up to 12 - 15% of total costs. We offer POS-based labor scheduling services that include custom product development or implementation of off-the-shelf labor-scheduling tools.
• Catering Management: With several years of domain experience in restaurant-based catering and domain, we have a long track record delivering order management, catering system administration, customer and contact management, vehicle & facility scheduling, order check-in, production reporting, along with start of day and end of day processing.
• Kitchen Operations Management: We have in-depth experience integrating POS applications with QSR Automation's Kitchen Display Systems (KDS). KDS provides a system that enables restaurant cooks to view items in color-coded format instead of the traditional hard copy printouts, leading to better efficiency and accuracy.
• Restaurant Reservation and Floor Management systems: With phone and Internet based table reservation and ordering growing in popularity, restaurant operators require reservation systems that enable managers to make changes and updates quickly and easily, while tracing customer reservation histories and menu preferences. With our in-depth domain knowledge and extensive technical skills base, Blue Monitor provides implementation and custom development services to restaurants seeking to take advantage of these service management systems

Blue Monitor Retail Point Solutions

The retail sector is confronted with unique challenges, ranging from multi-channel integration to standards-based POS and product ID initiatives. With our extensive enterprise architectural discipline and our retail domain expertise, Blue Monitor is well positioned to help retailers turn these challenges to competitive gain.

Multi-Channel Integration
For retailers, the real lesson of the dot COM years is that the Internet supplements, rather than replaces traditional brick and mortar retail. Consequently, while customers appreciate the convenience of online purchases, they still value the in-store experience.

Today, the web has become one of many "channels" by which retailers conduct business with customers. Other touch points include call centers, and on the horizon, wireless devices that could deliver proximity-based services to customers near the store. Regardless of channel, customers demand a consistent experience. With the web raising the bar in customer expectations for service, customers demand the same level of service regardless of where or how they are interacting with the retailer. Call centers and in-store terminals should have access to the same up to date customer profile and transaction history as the web. Furthermore, customers expect consistent rules that offer the same deal, or predictable rules for promotions that might be offered through a given channel.

Providing effective multi-channel integration requires an integrated back end. Using emerging standards and technologies, Blue Monitor has helped retailers integrate channels through implementation of CRM packages that are integrated with back end order management, merchandising, supply chain, and analytic systems. Leveraging our enterprise consulting services, we work with retailers to create multi-channel integration roadmap taking a consistent, architectural approach to integration.

The result is that we can help design and deliver a consistent framework that melds retail channels, helping retailers make the interaction with customers truly seamless.

Point of Sale (POS) Competency
With several staff years of experience in developing POS solutions throughout the retail and restaurant sector, Blue Monitor is spearheading initiatives to take the point of sale to the next generation. We are now helping retailers and restaurant operators implement the emerging OPOS (Open POS) standards, extend POS systems with wireless capabilities, integrate POS systems with back end enterprise transaction systems, upgrade POS systems 16- to 32-bit architectures, migrate POS systems, and fully internationalize POS devices.

We back our services with a POS lab at our offshore facility, where we can simulate real life restaurant and retail operations. Our lab includes equipment such as Micros touch screen registers, pole display units, printers for register and Kitchen printing (TM 300, TM 290), and kitchen display systems. Our lab provides full cycle testing of all POS equipment categories.

Sunrise 2005/GTIN Compliance Solution
With over 1000 staff years experience in technology platform migrations encompassing Y2K, HIPAA compliance, Euro conversion, and other efforts we are well qualified to help retailers undertake compliance with emerging international GTIN standards.

We have developed a well-defined framework of solutions and accelerators aimed at GTIN compliance, based on our GTIN domain knowledge and our SEI CMM Level 5 development capabilities. Blue Monitor's GTIN solution accelerators can automate processes, from project initiation through implementation, delivering significant cost benefits that improve quality and speed project turnaround time.

Enterprise Management

A cornerstone of our 4th Generation Offshore Outsourcing model, Blue Monitor delivers the expertise to build the enterprise backbone necessary for business operation. Capitalizing on our Enterprise Consulting practice, we take an architectural approach to developing an enterprise framework that is integratable and extensible. For retailers, our enterprise management offerings complement our vertical solutions by providing the enterprise backbone on which these solutions are built. Our retail enterprise management offerings include corporate transaction applications and business intelligence.

Corporate Applications
We deliver the back office applications that retailers need for managing their businesses. We have an established practice delivering ERP applications that manage corporate assets and resources, providing an integrated picture of the entire enterprise. That includes processes spanning planning, finance, accounts, and human resources. We have extensive experience working with standard ERP packages including SAP, Oracle e-Business Suite, and People Soft. Our services encompass implementation, legacy system integration, production support, ongoing enhancements and maintenance updates, and application value management.

Business Intelligence (BI)
We have extensive background developing data warehouses and business intelligence solutions that enable organizations to gain better insight on their operations, industry trends, and their customers. Many of our retailing clients have benefited from our BI solutions to analyze factors such as:

• Store Productivity
• Sales Trend Analysis
• Demand Forecasting
• Category and Assortment Analysis
• Price and Promotional Analysis
• Vendor Analysis
• Customer Analysis
• Inventory Analysis
• Profitability Analysis

Our BI services range from end-to-end solutions design and development to business requirements analysis, data modeling, ETL (data extraction, transformation, and loading) architecture and development, custom reporting, OLAP solutions, data mining, maintenance and enhancement.