Exciting times ! Today we announced the acquisition of a Toronto-based company, OrderDynamics. Their cloud-based OMS (Order Management System) brings with it a host of capabilities that support in-store pickup, endless aisle, distributed fulfillment, and single view of the customer and inventory across their retail stores and digital channels. In short, a valuable asset to any retailer seeking to transform their business in the direction of the big “O”…omni-channel retailing.

But an experience over the bank holiday weekend highlighted the challenges of delivering “end-to-end”, “omni-channel”. We had vouchers for Tesco that could only be spent on gardening products. The sun had come out so it was a fine time to redeem them. However, most of the gardening products on Tesco.com come from drop ship vendors. Result:  they are not available via Click & Collect and so my money got spent in the garden centre instead of online.

This disintermediation of the supply and delivery chain, and the need for a conscious approach to managing it has been clearly illustrated over recent months. The announcement of the controversial partnership between Morrisons and Ocado has highlighted the fact that it is increasingly difficult for companies to go it alone and create an end-to-end success story in the brave new world of 'omni-channel', however you might choose to define it. For Morrisons it will now be down to Ocado’s “Sally Strawberrry” and “Lucy Lemon” vans to deliver the desired 'customer experience'. Similarly with the Royal Mail’s announcement that it will offer Click & Collect; the fortunes of the village post office could be transformed as it becomes the local shopping delivery hub. With the Collect+ service that is already operating from local convenience stores, delivery lockers expected to sprout in similar locations from the likes of Amazon and others, it all makes for an interesting combination when giant global brands become dependent on corner stores to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty.

So back to IT. Retail has become like politics, a week can be a long time, and the end-game is far from clear. So investing in two year development projects, big capital budgets and large in-house development teams can be to the detriment of the business agility required to adopt new fulfillment strategies or new business partnership opportunities. With so much business and technical innovation taking place, adopting an agile approach to evolution using cloud-based technologies and partnerships with specialist providers might be the best way to lead the pack – rather than move at the speed of the slowest ship.

In conclusion. The economist David Ricardo became famous for his theory of comparative advantage – advocating that countries should focus on developing those products and services in which they had a comparative advantage – and should trade with others to source products which they couldn’t produce so efficiently. Similarly for retailers and brand-owners facing the challenge of omni-channel retailing; re-appraise what are their core strengths and their core assets and how to capitalise on those. Whether that be their stores, their IT department, or their products. Everything else should be open to scrutiny.