The Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2012 held this past May in Madrid opened on day two with a general session that focused on business transformation around the empowered customer. Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President of IBM Software Solutions, Lori Steele, General Manager of IBM Global Process Services, and Peter Connor, Group Information Systems Director of Home Retail Group, all gave presentations.
Smarter Commerce is designed to help companies better integrate and more effectively manage their value chain. It includes buy, market, sell and service processes that put the customer at the center of decisions and actions, leading to greater customer loyalty, revenue and profit margin growth, and agility. Smarter Commerce increases customer value, regardless of what or how a company currently sells. It does this by putting the customer at the center of specific business processes such as inventory optimization or reverse logistics. But it also takes a higher level approach, gradually reorienting the entire business model — from how a company approaches innovation to how it designs its operations — based on deep customer and market insights.
