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Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Retail organizations face an urgent need to accelerate digital transformation efforts in response to economic insecurity, persistent inflation, and growing consumer price sensitivity. Consumer product goods manufacturers (CPGs) and physical and online retail stores need to increase investments in strategic real-time pricing, supply chain resiliency, and customer experience management to keep pace with the competition. With cloud adoption, retailers have been successful and with emerging artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities on cloud, they can break the barriers. 

“Cloud adoption was the need, and AI on cloud is imperative today,” says Nilendu Pattanaik, Global Head Business Applications Practice, Microsoft Business Unit, at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). “Having hundreds of employees managing on-premises infrastructure is not cost-effective. Cloud adoption normalizes legacy infrastructures, standardizes applications, and reduces redundancies, and AI infuses new possibilities for experience and efficiency.”  

The right cloud platform helps businesses achieve their digital transformation goals. “Our key solutions for retail industries are built on Microsoft Cloud, which combine best-in-class retail and consumer products domain across multiple types of businesses, and process capabilities built by TCS with AI-enabled solutions that leverage Microsoft technologies,” Nilendu says. 

A cloud-first approach to modernization supported by AI should ensure that technology investments are in lockstep with the retailer’s business model and objectives. IT leaders are prioritizing models that are more agile, efficient, and intelligent, allowing them to respond to market changes quickly. The right model facilitates the adoption of new technologies on cloud, provides a framework for collaboration between teams seamlessly, and supports continuous refinements in an agile manner.  

Great expectations 

For all types of retail outlets, be it a website, a mobile app, or a physical store, it is vital to adopt strategies that meet shoppers’ heightened expectations. Customer loyalty and retention depend on it, and the competition is setting a high bar, with retail leaders incorporating AI as well as augmented reality technologies to create hyper-personalized customer experiences.   

These types of technologies require IT architecture and infrastructure that enable increased flexibility and scalability. A more engaging customer experience may be achieved through improving navigation in store-branded mobile app, for example, or by offering an AI-driven feature to help customers determine correct sizing for apparel. 

Small changes can have a big impact on performance. “Even a small reduction in the time it takes to deliver a cup of coffee could have a significant impact on employee productivity and the overall customer experience,” says Nilendu. “Spatial analytics and competitive analysis have started to play critical roles in driving differentiated experience, dynamic pricing strategy, store layouts and improved personalized buying experiences.”  

Supply chain resiliency  

Maintaining a competitive position in the retail world involves tremendous pressure to manage costs more effectively. Supply chain resiliency can help reduce disruptions, streamline inventory management, and improve operational efficiency. With AI and Microsoft Cloud, the right product at the right time can be supplied, stocked, sold, and served with a superior impact. 

“An AI-enabled, resilient and digital supply chain is one of the key focus areas for TCS to take to the market,” Nilendu says. “Similarly, this is one of the key platforms from Microsoft Dynamics 365 for the retail industry, and with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot in both ERP and CRM, the solutions have now got wings of intelligence for smart selling and hyper-personalized experience. Hence, we have created a smart and resilient supply chain framework on Microsoft Cloud for Retail integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Dynamics Point of Sales, powered with Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Azure OpenAI, to help retailers transform across the entire value chain.” 

As retailers transform, privacy and security of consumer data must remain the top priority. “Security and compliance are paramount for retail businesses because they’re dealing with so much personally identifiable information (PII) and need to be competitively ahead while being compliant,” says Nilendu. “It is extremely important to manage that data privacy at the highest security level. Normalizing your data infrastructure on Microsoft Cloud allows you to manage security and compliance across multiple geographies more effectively through one major security framework.” 

Retailers are under pressure to transform into more responsive and resilient organizations to meet broader competition and rapidly changing customer expectations. A cloud-first approach supported by next-generation technologies powered with AI can help transform operations, optimize inventory, store operation, market outreach and supply chain management, and enhance customer experiences to deliver sustainable growth while staying compliant, maintaining security, and preventing fraud. 

Learn how to master your cloud transformation journey with TCS and Microsoft Cloud. 

Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation, Retail Industry

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

As consumers embrace ecommerce, digital banking, and online payment applications, the risk of fraud and other financial crimes has increased dramatically. Every new portal and mobile app expand the attack surface and give hackers new opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities. The stakes for financial organizations are growing as well. In 2021, U.S. fraud losses amounted to $5.9 billion, a 436% increase over 2017 levels, according to McKinsey. And for every dollar lost to fraud, banks spend over $4 on recovery fees, legal fees, and other expenses. 

Thwarting financial crime is never easy, but by adopting the right cloud infrastructure and strategically deploying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, financial institutions can get ahead of bad actors, gaining insight into their tactics, discovering their activity sooner, and preventing attacks before they lead to a loss.

Challenges for fraud risk management 

Fraud is a big and a worthwhile business for today’s online criminals, who troll the internet and insert data-stealing malware into vulnerable sites and mobile apps. They sell stolen data on the dark web, where they form alliances to trade tactics and technologies, such as AI algorithms that can crack even the most complex passwords in seconds. They purchase thousands of illicit debit and credit card numbers and combine them with other hacked information—including Social Security numbers of children, who have no financial history—to create false identities and open multiple fraudulent accounts.  

To counter these measures, financial institutions are taking increasingly aggressive steps to identify suspicious behaviors and transactions quickly. 

“One main challenge faced by financial organizations is the complexity of correlated data needed to discover deviant behavior and patterns,” says Archana Trikha, Associate General Manager at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). “Mature banks perform massive volumes of transactions, but less than one percent are fraudulent, so it’s basically finding the needle in the haystack. When a card or an ATM transaction is taking place, you need to identify suspicious activity and take a decisive action in milliseconds.”  

Traditional tables and relational databases at the back end of financial systems and applications are often siloed. By missing important correlations, analysts or automated systems may not spot illegal activity soon enough to prevent a loss. When suspicious activity is flagged, it can hold up a transaction while a representative investigates the matter, frustrating customers.   

Fighting back with AI  

“Effective fraud prevention requires financial institutions to stay a step ahead of cybercriminals by incorporating AI technologies and multiple dimensions related to sequence of events to identify suspicious activity in real time,” Trikha says. One essential step is accessing the processing power of Microsoft Cloud, where organizations can integrate and analyze large data sets from multiple data sources, swiftly correlating them for possible connections to fraudsters or money-laundering shell companies.  

For example, organizations can use cloud-based AI applications to analyze customer behavior, discerning near-real time deviations from a real customer’s profile, identifying anomalous behavior, or identifying collusions among entities. AI can also enhance existing software, such as alerting systems, which often generate many false positives. In addition to reducing alert fatigue, AI capabilities can provide reasons for its decisions, saving staff hours of time in compiling compliance reports. 

“These are just some of the advanced technologies TCS deploys and customizes for financial clients,” Trikha says. Once big data and AI systems are set up in Microsoft Cloud, they continue to incorporate the latest information about threats, investigations, and interventions, helping financial institutions to stay one step ahead of criminals. 

Learn how to master your cloud transformation journey with TCS and Microsoft Cloud.  

Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation, Financial Services Industry

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Blackhawk Network is shaping the future of global branded payments — from QR code payment solutions and retail gift card programs to tailored incentives and reward programs. 

The Silicon Valley-based company has been expanding its global footprint through numerous creative acquisitions. While each brought a wealth of benefits, the acquired companies’ existing processes and platforms challenged Blackhawk Network’s ability to optimize and scale its go-to-market strategy. 

To address this issue, Blackhawk turned to TCS. With its extensive cloud experience, TCS transformed Blackhawk’s ERP and CRM systems in tandem, enabling the sales of one set of solutions and services to a global customer base at scale.  

In this case study, Blackhawk Network’s Cara Renfroe joins Tata Consultancy Services’ Rakesh Kumar and Nilendu Pattanaik to explain how TCS transformed the gift card company’s customer engagement and global operations on Microsoft Cloud.  

Read more. 

Cloud Computing, Financial Services Industry, IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has always been a digital-first organization. Continuous transformation of the workplace has been a cornerstone of the company’s business model for several decades.  

This approach proved its value during the COVID-19 crisis, when TCS pioneered location-independent “borderless workspaces” aided by Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. The modern workplace solution suite was the perfect fit for TCS’s constantly evolving needs, becoming a canvas for improving the experience of 500,000 employees while maintaining the security and integrity of the company’s systems and data.  

At the same time, TCS is focusing on maintaining a secure environment and preventing fraud. According to a recent Microsoft blog, organizations can use security and compliance solutions in Microsoft 365 E5 to have visibility into their threat landscape and leverage built-in AI and machine learning in Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud to proactively manage threats and reduce alert fatigue.  

Watch the video. 

Cloud Computing, Financial Services Industry, Microsoft

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

The retail industry is always in motion. Shifting macro-economic influences and changing customer expectations spark new business models, channel strategies, and strategic partnerships. To keep pace, retailers require a strong digital core that delivers powerful data-driven insights while staying compliant, maintaining security, and preventing fraud.  

Shree Venkat, chief architect at TCS, and GV Krishnan, Head of Solutions & Sales for the TCS Microsoft Unit in the UK and Ireland, note that business transformation, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), can help retailers innovate across four primary areas:  

Customer experience: Consumers want to engage with a retailer in a manner that eases their path through the shopping transaction.  TCS is a pioneer in delivering cloud-based solutions that facilitate hyper-personalization, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CoPilot, which turns service agents into superagents.  With Copilot, which brings next-generation AI capabilities and natural language processing to Dynamics 365, agents can quickly craft a draft email or chat response to customers with a single click. 

These insights can be used to deliver exclusive pricing offers, personalized call center access, and other rewards that build customer loyalty. AI/ML-based solutions like  Microsoft Cognitive Services helps further drive bespoke preferential services through sophisticated vision, language, speech, sentiment and contextual analysis to make bots more informed and more conversational.  

Retailers are also improving customer experiences by removing friction. Digitally driven innovations such as automated self-checkouts, pick and go, and contactless payments are helping in making happy customers. “When retailers embark on this journey, they gain more control in providing optimum customer experience and give their customers a sense of affiliation at the same time” says Shree Venkat. 

Store and channel operations: Customers have fully embraced ecommerce, social commerce, mobile commerce, and services such as buy online/pick up in store (BOPIS) and buy online/pick up at curb (BOPAC). 5G and edge computing technologies are helping retailers integrate and optimize in-store experiences. TCS specializes in AI-powered vision technologies like Microsoft Azure Percept to create a smart retail store solution that helps with visitor recognition, foot traffic analysis, store design planning, product quantity/quality checks, and more.  

Supply chain & sustainability transformation: Integration of data and digital systems with suppliers is a quintessential requirement for retailers to embark on intelligent supply chain initiatives. IoT & AI/ML-powered technologies can enable business capabilities such as just-in-time inventory management and auto-replenishment, which in addition to reducing waste and saving money also help retailers track, record, manage, reduce, and report emissions.  (In this whitepaper, TCS and Microsoft explore how to embark on supply chain decarbonization initiatives.)  

Employee experience: Shree Venkat believes the above three areas of business transformation seamlessly and quickly empower retail staff. Low-code/no-code technologies like Microsoft Power Platform, Azure Communication Services, and Azure OpenAI enable organizations to quickly capture customer sentiment, search for and respond to customer queries, and pass on the information to their frontline employees, providing real-time data about stocks, product insights, customer profiles, their buying patterns, and other behaviors to help them deliver better experiences across multiple channels. Training employees to use new digital tools and services is a critical step in the transformation journey for retailers. 

A powerful partnership 

Retailers face many challenges in keeping pace with rapidly changing markets and consumer demands. TCS along with Microsoft empower retailers to maximize the value derived from their Microsoft Cloud investments. The TCS Algo Retail™ framework, together with Microsoft Cloud for Retail, helps retail organizations transform into resilient, adaptable enterprises. 

TCS offers a rich portfolio of intellectual property using machine vision, conversational assistants, predictive analytics, machine learning, AI, and other capabilities on Microsoft Cloud. They include:  

TCS Optumera™— A strategic retail optimization suite that enables integrated, intelligent merchandising and supply chain decisions TCS OmniStore™— A future commerce platform that enables unified customer journeys catering to new channels and brand expansions TCS Optunique™— An enterprise personalization solution that delivers contextual hyper-personalization across omnichannel journeys 

These solutions help retailers enhance customer engagement, accelerate the launch of new products and services, build differentiation, and unlock business value.  

Learn how to master your cloud transformation journey with TCS and Microsoft Cloud.  

Cloud Computing, Retail Industry