"It's an important piece of our strategy and an example of innovation in business model. With this transformational product packed with breakthrough applications, we expect a significant business impact," he said.
Apart from other geographies, this product would also see special action in the domestic market.
Dadlani observes that the Indian retail space is more geared up for such a product as Indian retailers do not want to spend time in repeating mistakes and would rather leapfrog across large ERP applications to smarter solutions like this.Retail, as he adds is an important vertical for Infosys with over 70 customers.
"There was a substantial gap between what the customers wanted and what the available technologies could do." This is what triggered the development after the company identified the gap areas in retail.
It took two years of development time and the product has already gone through pilots across the US, Europe and Asia with useful feedback, insights and a deployment time of about a week as the key highlights.
The product would be delivered on a managed services model and hence could be put over both from scratch or legacy layers.Infosys would put the system in place for the customer who then pays on a per-use format in a subscription based model.
As more and more applications are added, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) would come down, explains Dadlani.
Commenting on the viability of implementations, he pointed out, "Retailers already have many applications in place. The solution addresses the gap in particular as visibility, for example, could be useful to existing applications. We will implement it in the store and the customer pays for the information and insight derived henceforth which could be on a self-service portal independent of existing IT infrastructure."
The three key orientation points of this product are the retailer, FMCG companies and the shopper as it claims to have features and applications for each of these. Explaining the key elements of this product, Girish A Ramachandra, head of innovations practice, retail, CPG and logistics shared, "ShoppingTrip360 leverages a network of wireless sensor-based applications within the store that allows people (shoppers), places (retailers) and products (CPG companies) to collaborate in real-time by creating an information ecosystem.""This permission-based, implicit and seamless exchange of information delivers value to shoppers, retailers and CPG companies," he added.
All these other technology enablers are also developed entirely by Infosys and the company is offering services as an independent vendor while it has partners and other ecosystem players for components.
"The patent-pending technology behind ShoppingTrip360 is based on Infosys' intellectual property and designed to operate with existing store and information technology infrastructure," Ramachandra says.According to him, "Infosys fully invests in the platform infrastructure, protecting clients from the risk of capital investment and technology obsolescence thereby eliminating the traditional barriers to adoption of in-store technologies within the industry."
Clients subscribe to ShoppingTrip360 services and pay for the information that enables business benefits, he added.
"It helps retailers to know the total number of shoppers and their shopping trip paths, allowing them to gauge in-store energy demand based on occupancy, or open new checkout counters when lines start forming."
They can also monitor shelf-level inventory of fast moving products without using expensive RFID tags. It enables CPG companies to make choices on the right locations in the store to place their promotional products," he said.It could be queue management, granular visibility of in-store activity or shopping behavior, non-intrusive interaction with the shopper and thus ability to influence decisions in a non-intrusive manner at the MoT (Moment of Truth) and so on.
FMCG companies can have advantages like real-time out-of-stock info or location-based behavior, areas of concentration, media placement based on these.
The shopper too can have once shop concierge services like recipes, advice, scheme info, coupons etc on a mobile device once he chooses to activate the same and so it's a service that is on-demand, which has privacy and is user friendly.
Talking of scale and heterogeneity of customer demands, Dadlani says, "We will wait till large scale roll-outs before we talk of scale though we are already witnessing demands for hundreds of users for our customers."