Retail Supply Chain Digital Transformation

When retail executives talk about “supply chain digital transformation,” Walmart and Amazon are two examples that come to mind; Walmart has partnered with ViziApps to rapidly develop and deploy secure apps to over 50,000 mobile devices to increase its supply chain performance and efficiency.

But many of the other 300 or so $1 billion-plus retailers have been much slower to embrace digital transformation. And they are suffering new competitive pressures because of it.

That reason is not always a gap in ambition, awareness, or willingness to invest, though. Often, it is a gap in the transformation model itself. And ViziApps can help these other retailers succeed with digital transformation, too.

Mobile apps are the critical link for retail supply chain digital transformation. And even when retailers embrace mobile devices to replace clipboards, they often become frustrated at how long it takes to get new mobile ideas in secure production use by their logistics frontline worers. A significant reason they still fall behind is the mobile app deployment gap.

Rapid application development (RAD) — no-code and low-code platforms, and now AI-assisted app building — has genuinely solved how quickly a mobile workflow app prototype or POC test app can be built. A retailer’s operations team, or a lean IT group, can now demonstrate a working app concept for a specific warehouse task in days.

So building the app is not the actual bottleneck. Getting a finished app through enterprise security reviews, secure data integration, app suer identity and access management, device provisioning, and governance approvals — and released onto frontline workers’ devices — is where the calendar time goes.

App development can take a few days, but that doesn’t help if deployment takes weeks or months.

ViziApps solves this with rapid application development and deployment (RADD) in which the entire app development and deployment process is integrated within the company’s IT security perimeter. Rather than lengthy security reviews and integration for each app, these are done once and then automatically inherited for each new app. IT retains security and governance control, and logistics operations teams rapidly create and deploy the mobile tools their workers need to improve supply chain performance. All of this without changing your company’s IT security rules or exposing your proprietary data outside your security perimeter.

Talk with ViziApps today about how we can accelerate supply chain digital transformation at your company.