One of the most interesting discussions I had at this week's NRF show was with Steve Earl, Director of Product Marketing for Kronos. I am not that familiar with the work management segment of store automation and my last experience with Kronos had been as a time clock company. A lot has changed.
As technology companies have struggled to differentiate themselves, one way Kronos has worked to single themselves out is by taking a more holistic approach to the customer's personnel administration chores. They offer the hardware, the application software, and capture the transaction data for personnel administration. In fact, they made a recent acquisition that provides the master data needed to drive the applicant screening process.
This makes a lot of sense. An IT solution really has four parts: Infrastructure, Software, Transaction Data, and Master Data. Infrastructure is the hardware and network; application software consists of task specific programs; transaction data is generated by the business operations; and master data is relatively unchanging or provided by third parties. The company that provides all four pieces benefits because it makes their solution so much easier for customers to implement.
Discussion Questions: Do you see this as a trend? Are more companies taking a holistic perspective of their customer's hardware, software and data needs?
[Author's comment: I really think Kronos is onto something here and I don't know of any other vendors doing the same thing. I have done some work with independent and small retailers. It would be great if they could role in an automated solution and just start using it. A perfect example would be a point of sale system that, in addition to the hardware, offered a file maintenance service that maintained the master data. Instead of each retailer loading the master file with UPCs and descriptions, the vendor would do it once and distribute the data to all the stores that use their equipment. Now, the small guy can roll in the POS hardware, load their retails, and be off and running with a scanning system without doing master maintenance.]