The Transformative Power of Events in Retail

In today’s omni-channel retail landscape, competition is more intense than ever and retailers are using technology in ways not before possible. With the ubiquity of cloud services, those most aggressively pursuing integrated digital strategies are winning over the customer. Information is uniquely powerful because unlike shelf space or delivery trucks, you can use it any number of times and ways. Unfortunately, many retailers still exchange data between systems with antiquated point-to-point interfaces because migrating from this approach can be complicated. Doing so makes it really difficult to distribute information across their enterprise and reuse it as part of new processes, to fuel analytics engines and decision support tools, and to reuse it in new and interesting ways.

Before I joined Solace, I worked for Europe’s largest retailer, the Schwarz group, which operates Kaufland and Lidl supermarkets, for 11 years. I worked as a leader for the integration platform team and lastly as a product owner for event streaming and messaging, where my last project was one of the most exciting – I was part of the team that migrated the Schwarz messaging platform (1 billion messages/day) to Solace PubSub+ Platform to build an event mesh that could stream data across a hybrid- and multi-cloud environment in such a way that it could be sent to and reused by countless systems across their organization in an event-driven manner. (Note that in the worlds of event-driven architecture (EDA) and event streaming, we refer to event-driven information as “events” – I’ll explain more below…

In this post, I’ll explain why it’s so important for retailers to make the most of their in-store, online and supply channel events, and how Solace’s smart topics make it easy to maximize event reuse through hierarchy and wildcards. I’ll then show how it all comes together by sharing what Schwarz has achieved.

Events 101

Anything that happens within a retail business can be considered an event – a customer checking out at a register, a high temperature detected in a warehouse, a delivery truck getting a flat tire, etc. They all have the potential to affect your business to some degree, and some have ripple effects that impact many processes and people. That’s why it’s important to make sure applications and people know about them, so they can react to them. Say you want to update your inventory when a customer buys a product – very typical use case for an event which is coming into the inventory system. As uses for this information become more complex, these events can have a global impact across diverse technologies.

Types of Events

There are several different kinds of events:

• Notification Only: The one everybody knows is the notification only: “hey, something changed.” You might get a business object key, but you don’t have the data in the event and you don’t have the metadata, so you have to call back to the source system to get the data. An example would be that a customer’s contact info changed, but you don’t even know it was the street address, specifically.
• Notification with Metadata: In this case, you know, what changed. So for example, you know the customer’s street address changed, but you don’t know what it changed to. Again, you need a call back scenario. This gives you tight control of content if you want to have this in place.
• Notification with Data: Most common in retail enterprise application use cases, in this case, you’ll get the actual data that changed: the address, the street…everything you need to know to be able to react on this event.
• Command: There’s a fourth type of event which all of you using async API are aware of. It’s the command event. In this case, you can send an event to a system and the event is doing something with it based on your command.

You’ll end up selecting and combining these types of events depending on your use case. This diagram shows three event producers (a web site, mobile app and point-of-sale system) and the different events they produce (an order, a customer query and a product return).

What’s Driving the Need for Events

• Cost Savings: Retailers need to be more efficient across the board, including within internal processes and how they do, for example, integration.
• Importance of Innovation: They need to overcome new challenges associated with building new offerings like BOPIS/BORIS, e-couponing and loyalty programs to stay competitive.
• Commitment to Omni-Channel: Covid changed buying behavior forever; customers now buy in a way that requires the combination of, and coordination between, online and physical stores.
• Customer Experience Expectations: Switched-on retailers are using hyper-personalization to the max, meeting customers where they are, and anticipating their next move by leveraging behavior events and incorporating new technologies such as AI and ML.

Events in Retail

I’ve been talking a lot about events and reusability, but what are the events coursing through major retailers?

Supply Chain Events: Logistics and Production/Disposition

I want to showcase how many business processes are empowered by events at larger retailers. So let’s start at the bottom — supply chain management, which is full of event-driven use cases. Think about route planning that could be modified in response to equipment failures or traffic congestion, or stock metrics which need to be accurate so that the customer knows things are definitely available for purchase.

Getting Product and Data To, Into and Out of Stores

Looking at the store layer, there are many use cases related to the processes of getting products to the store, into the store and out of the store – many of which revolve around events. Just think about sending product master data to your point of sale systems, even sales data, which is being sent out of the store and needs to be reused by many different systems.

Business Operations Efficiencies

There are many processes that revolve around events in corporate headquarters. For example, within recruitment, where each employee’s journey from “hired to retired” is full of synchronous events. So too are customer-facing processes related to e-couponing and loyalty programs. Finance is a big ‘event’ producer too, as it’s tied into all those different business processes I just described.

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