The living products lifecycle · 4 – The living products lifecycle 1. Your factory With ‘offline’ products, you have limited visibility into your production cycle – you can’t

1 – The living products lifecycle

The living products lifecycleHow Smart Cosmos transforms brands and retail – from supply chains and stores to consumer experiences


Bridging the digital-physical disconnect

The digital transformation of your business is crucial. But as long as your operation depends on the production, distribution and sale of physical products, it’ll take more than a couple of digital apps to get there.

In fact, there are serious gaps between the digital, data-driven world on your screens and the physical, product-driven word on the ground.

- It’s why it’s still so hard to uncover the hidden inefficiencies between your factory, supply chain and stores.

- It’s why product fraud continues to steal billions of dollars away from the retail industry1.

- And it’s why you still can’t see what happens when your customers buy and use your products at and after your offline points of sale.

Here’s the problem – when your products aren’t connected to the Internet, their movements through the offline world can’t be tracked and managed by your digital systems. As far as your data’s concerned, they’re moving through an offline black hole.

We embed RFID intelligence into the products you already sell so you can connect them to the digital systems you already use. We turn ‘offline’ products into living products. That’s a big deal.

Because it means you can use living product data to synchronize the efficient movement of your products from factory to supply chain to store. Even better, it means you can give your customers exclusive, personalized and dynamic customer experiences when they tap your products with their phones.

This is about using the products you sell today to transform your operations. And turning them into platforms for consumer experience innovation where it matters most – at and after the offline point of sale. As mobile commerce takes off, this represents a huge opportunity.

In this guide, we’ll be showing you all the ways you can use living products and living product data to reinvent your business – without reinventing your products.

Let’s dive in.

The ‘offline’ product lifecycle

Living products tell you what they are, where they are, how they’re doing and who’s using them. To see why that matters, it helps to look at the lifecycle of ‘offline’ products.



1. Your factory

With ‘offline’ products, you have limited visibility into your production cycle – you can’t see how many products come off the factory lines or even when they do. One global fashion brand found that a large percentage of its stock in one factory wasn’t even authorized. It could easily have ended up in uncontrolled sales channels.


2. Your supply chain

Once packaged, all you can see are boxes, palettes and shipping containers. And you can only count them at certain points. Without an item-level view, optimization of your supply chain is difficult.


3. Your stores

Once delivered, it takes inefficient manual stock counts to maintain decent levels of inventory accuracy. But ‘decent’ isn’t enough to avoid sales losses and disappointed shoppers.


4. Your consumers

When your products are bought offline, you can’t see who bought them or what they did next. These are also the moments they’re most excited about your brand.

So the next time you interact with them online, you don’t know what they bought or how they used it. And your personalization and customer experience technology now treats them like almost complete strangers.


Metrics: Your real world, in real time

So now that we’ve seen how little you can see across the offline product lifecycle, let’s look at how living products change things.

Your real world operations move in real time. Living product data gives you a near real-time view of where they are and how they’re doing.

Our solution Metrics turns that living product data into analytic insights, showing you what’s happening in your stores, while it’s happening.

This is how you sell more products and lower the costs of your operations – at the same time.


9 – The living products lifecycle9 – The living products lifecycle

Metrics:Store optimization

Track every single product with item-level granularity.

Turn demand visibility into allocation efficiency.

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Metrics:Store readiness

Maintain inventory accuracy of close to 100%.

Prevent product loss.

Instantly locate misplaced items.

Avoid stock outs with rapid replenishment.


Metrics:Store optimization

Replace manual stock counts to make life easier for your workforce.

Gain visual merchandising insights.

Make smarter decisions about stock allocation.

Optimize markdown timing and depth.



Metrics:Omnichannel consistency

Use inventory visibility to improve your local ads.

Ship directly from your stores based on your current inventory.

Maintain the same living product data set across online and offline channels.



Metrics:Merchandise and consumer engagement

Track which products have been tried on (and how many of them were then bought).

Visualize consumers’ path to purchase.

Come up with new rules to deduce patterns in product consideration.

Spot issues based on data from the fitting room.


Experiences: Your products are your platform

Even though mobile has an increasingly central role to play in shopping, the vast majority of retail sales still happen offline. So if you’re going to invest in personalization and consumer experience innovation, offline is exactly where you should be using it to turn consumers into loyal fans.

Our solution Experiences turns living products into platforms for consumer experience innovation – so you can deliver exclusive, personalized content at the tap of a phone, at and after the point of sale.

It gives you unprecedented post-sale insights. And the ability to deliver innovative experiences in the real world, at digital scale. This is how you use mobile experiences to transform offline product sales.



Experiences:Dynamic interactions

Deliver interactions for the point of sale.

Deliver dynamic content depending on where the consumer is.

Drive consumers to your social media campaigns.



Experiences: Loyalty sign-ups

Digitize your warranty registration forms.

Turn their genuine excitement into post-sale sign ups for digital coupons and newsletters.

Experiences:Counterfeit prevention

Give consumers the ability to authenticate products anywhere.


Let them reorder the whole product when they’re done.

Experiences: Turn products into subscription services

Let them order refills when they run out.



The living product lifecycle

Now that you’ve seen all the things living products can do, as well as all the things living product data enables you to do, it’s worth zooming back out and looking at the whole living product lifecycle.



1. Your factory

Now you can see exactly how many products you’ve produced, how many are authentic and even how they’re moving through production.


2. Your supply chain

You’re now looking at a dynamic, item-level view of your supply chain. That means more insights for efficiency gains. But it also means your whole supply chain is more responsive to store demand.

2.Your supply chain

3.Your stores

4.Your consumers

x11

x15

!

1.Your factory


3. Your stores

Your people are happier and more efficient. Consumers always know what they’re going to get. And you’ve got deeper insights than you thought you’d ever get into how consumers buy your products.

2.Your supply chain

3.Your stores

4.Your consumers

x11

x15

!

1.Your factory


4. Your consumers

Most important – you now know who bought what, where they bought it and depending on how much you want to engage with them, how they’re using it.

You’re also delivering personalized consumer experience innovations where the vast majority of sales happen.

All without reinventing your products.

2.Your supply chain

3.Your stores

4.Your consumers

x11

x15

!

1.Your factory


This is big

Your products are the lifeblood of your business. So the physical production, supply chain and store operations you rely on to sell them represent your business’ beating heart.

But as long as these crucial processes exist offline, disconnected from your business’ inevitably digital future, you’ll continue to struggle with product fraud, inefficiencies and post-sale blindness.

By embedding intelligence into the products you already sell and then connecting them to the digital systems you already use, you stand to gain all the insights and consumer experience innovations you’ve just heard about.

This is about reinventing your business, without reinventing your products.

The Internet of Things has presented retail and brands with a compelling vision of greater consumer engagement, deeper insights and meaningfully, more efficient operations.

So far, that vision has been reserved only for companies selling fundamentally redesigned smart and network connected machines, all-singing, all-dancing products.

By combining mature technologies like RFID and data management, you can finally turn that restricted vision into full-blown reality.

This is the Internet of your things.

We’re Smartrac

And we embed intelligence into the products you already sell so you can connect them to the digital systems you already use.

Smart Cosmos makes living product data accessible and practical so product-driven companies can change the way they manage their operations and interact with customers.

So if you’re looking for a near real-time view of your real world, we should talk. www.smart-cosmos.com

https://www.smart-cosmos.com/contact/

https://www.smart-cosmos.com

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The living products lifecycle · 4 – The living products lifecycle 1. Your factory With ‘offline’ products, you have limited visibility into your production cycle – you can’t