Reflexis Systems at NRF 2017: Sensing the Retail Store’s Pulse

 
Reflexis Systems, a privately held software provider of retail store execution (or operations) software solutions, is gaining presence in the industry and expanding its software platform to better serve retail stores. TEC’s PJ Jakovljevic was at mid-January’s National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show and reports on the vendor’s efforts to provide Internet of Things (IoT)-based software solutions that enhance retail store labor operations and offer real-time store execution.  

Reflexis Overview

Founded in 2001, Reflexis is headquartered in Dedham, Massachusetts, and has offices in Atlanta, London, Düsseldorf, and Pune (India), with additional sales presence across cities in Europe and Latin America. Some of the company’s ~320 employees are stationed in their home offices in many other places.
 
The Reflexis retail store execution (operations) software platform started from store operations software solutions such as task management for corporate planners and store managers and retail store auditing for regional managers (the latter called StoreWalk). In 2009, the vendor expanded into the realm of labor operations software solutions such as time and attendance (T&A), workforce management (labor budgeting, forecasting, and scheduling), employee self-service, mobile apps, and analytics (see figure 1). These retail store execution capabilities aim to enable retailers to align store labor and activities with corporate goals and to institutionalize best-practice responses to near real-time exceptions and alerts.
 
More than 240 of global retailers in multiple vertical retail categories have reported significant improvements in store-level compliance with corporate strategies and increased revenue and profitability after implementing Reflexis solutions. These include grocery, quick service restaurant (QSR), convenience, specialty, big box, and apparel stores. In fact, Reflexis has an impressively high customer retention rate of 97% and high customer satisfaction ratings.
 

Figure 1. Reflexis retail execution platform  

IoT-enabled StorePulse

Reflexis recently moved into the real-time retail store operations realm with StorePulse. This solution has since been adopted by major discount, grocery, consumer electronics, and drug/pharmacy chains. This is an IoT play where retailers can link their existing systems and devices to Reflexis to create automated best practice actions for store associates and store managers. This is based on metrics and exceptions from store supply chains, point-of-sale (POS) devices, store traffic counters, loss prevention, and various other retail systems (see figure 2).
 
For example, a major big box retailer is using the Reflexis StorePulse solution to greatly improve the efficiency of execution of the retailer’s in-store price matching promise to consumers (who typically come to showroom and then buy from the likes of Amazon). In this setup, store managers can approve the price reduction request by responding to a StorePulse alert with a simple “yes or no” click or finger push. Previously, store managers would have had to spend an inordinate amount of time shuffling papers or through computer screens to find info on the product whose price discount needed approval, which prevented them from doing more valuable stuff (imagine doing about 30 such approvals a day).
 

Figure 2. Reflexis StorePulse
 
Reflexis and Pricer have recently announced an alliance to further automate retail stores. Store associates can receive auto-generated and prioritized tasks in StorePulse (based on real-time notifications from related devices and systems), and locate products immediately on the shelves to perform inventory control, omnichannel fulfillment, recalls, and other processes. For example, Pricer’s task-to-light digital shelf gadgets can guide store associates to the location of blinking items that need to be picked for a customer’s particular click-and-collect online order. Upon performing tasks, store associates can also update back-office applications in real time using mobile devices.  

Current Retail Store Execution Software Buying Trends

In 2016, Reflexis reportedly signed a record number of customers, transactions, and sales bookings. This included the biggest QSR chain in Germany, apparel and grocery retailers in Mexico, several convenience/gas stations chains, DIY retailers/hardware stores, office supplies, electronics, beauty, and department store chains. In addition, Reflexis has seen an increase in repeat customers, which come back and select and implement additional Reflexis products. Another trend is that as customers upgrade, they tend to move their products from in-house enterprise solutions managed and maintained by their own information technology (IT) staffs to Reflexis’ cloud offering. The move to the cloud frees up the customer’s IT resources.
 
Reflexis is seeing about half of its new sales in labor operations and half in store operations (task manager and store audit), but most importantly the biggest trend has been an increase in customers (for example, Office Depot) that are implementing the vendor’s entire platform of solutions, including advanced analytics and reporting. Retailers that don’t buy the entire platform (but rather initially go for some particular module), choose to add on mobility capabilities about 60% of the time, and analytics at about 40% of the time.  

IBM Retail Relationship

Reflexis has had a long relationship with IBM Retail, and has been certified by IBM Watson artificial intelligence (AI)/cognitive computing, but is much more engaged with IBM in areas such as Cognos Analytics. Proof of concepts for IBM Watson AI have been done at some existing customers, such as to test the “back-to-school” campaigns or how to handle major college football games in the college football–infatuated US South. But while retailers have liked the suggested actions of IBM Watson, they have been deterred by the need to have additional IT staff feeding new knowledge into the AI engine, so that it could be effective continually.
 
On the other hand, IBM Cognos now provides the business intelligence (BI) underpinnings for all of Reflexis out-of-the-box and custom report creation modules. Retailers such as Office Depot are using reporting to identify trends in labor operations and store execution to address the following questions, for example:
 

• Which store managers are making the most edits to their schedules and what is the correlation between number and type of edits and ability to hit sales or labor budget goals? In other words, are store managers taking schedules already optimized to align the right people with customer demand, and needlessly editing them to conform to the “old” ways of scheduling because “that’s the way we’ve always done it?”
• How do certain regions compare in hitting their labor ops or store execution goals compared with other regions?
• What is the correlation with the time schedules posted for stores versus schedule efficiency or effectiveness? In other words, are store managers who post schedules to stores just in time to meet business deadlines making last-second edits that reduce effectiveness?
• What is the correlation between when complex tasks such as merchandising re-sets or launching of entire back-to-school campaign with when those projects first become visible to stores? And does the date made visible correlate with an increased or a decreased store completion rate?

 
All of these and many other insights can drive improvement through better processes at the corporate office and better practices in retail stores through fact-based conversations or coaching. Reflexis is aware of a tight competition with Kronos, JDA Software, Infor, Ceridian Dayforce, and other workforce management (WFM) software peers, but cites its pure retail focus versus these other vendors’ pursuit of other industries and product development efforts outside WFM (e.g., merchandize planning and transportation for JDA). Some other competitors’ task management software solutions might still be nascent and half-baked, and positioned merely as an input to labor standards for the purpose of increasing uptake of their much stronger general labor scheduling solutions. But to compete even better, the relatively smaller and lesser-known Reflexis should build a stronger partner ecosystem, and the recent announcement with the Connors Group is a step in the right direction.  

Related Reading

Reflexis Announces StorePulse Module for IBM Watson
Talking to (and Learning from) a Retail Store Execution Software Leader - Part 2
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