Modularity drives retail agility and resilience

Consumer habits and industry trends are evolving with the rise of new technologies and options designed to improve shopping experiences. Retailers also face unexpected situations requiring immediate adaptation, as evidenced by the pandemic. In this rapidly changing and volatile environment, modularity provides significant benefits, enhancing retailers’ agility and resilience in their operations.

Why is Modularity Key?

Gartner identifies modularity as one of the three core principles of a composable architecture. It allows businesses to modify and update parts of their applications without affecting the entire system, facilitating a quicker response to market and customer needs. This concept is especially crucial for retailers today. The proliferation of new channels, technologies, and rapid shifts in customer habits require greater agility. Additionally, heightened competition compels retailers to stand out through faster and more frequent innovation, making modularity essential.

Benefits of Modularity

Greater Agility and Speed of Adoption

From implementation to ongoing maintenance, modularity helps retailers reduce the time required to adopt and adapt the system to both expected and unexpected needs.

Increased Innovation Capability and Ease for Pilots

Quick testing capabilities enhance innovation, making it easier to conduct controlled pilot projects with new functionalities and reducing risks. Modularity also streamlines the adoption of new innovations from technology providers, keeping retailers up-to-date and ahead of competitors.

Easier Adaptation to Different Scenarios

With diverse channels and omnichannel scenarios, as well as various store types like flagships and pop-ups, a modular solution facilitates adapting to different situations, enabling phased strategies that better meet current needs.

Reduced Maintenance Costs

Modularity increases the efficiency of necessary changes, allowing new functionalities to be introduced more controlledly, reducing maintenance time and costs.

Modularity in Orisha Retail Chains

Orisha Retail Chains offers a fully modular platform that follows Gartner’s principles of a composable architecture. It provides retailers with greater flexibility in adoption and the freedom to expand their system to meet specific business needs at their own pace. Modularity minimizes the time and risk of introducing new innovations. Combined with its API-first architecture, Orisha Retail Chains helps retailers adapt and innovate more quickly and efficiently, driving greater agility and resilience in retail operations.

Functional Modularity of Orisha Retail Chains

Functional modularity allows retailers to implement standard retail solutions either fully or partially, alone or in combination with others, enabling adaptation to various scenarios. Crucially, this does not compromise future evolution. For example, a retailer might choose to implement only the Orisha Retail Chains POS software for fixed registers in some stores. In others, they might implement the solution for traditional POS, while adding self-checkout and mobile terminals in different locations. All of this integrates with existing systems like their ERP or eCommerce platform. In the future, the retailer can expand with new capabilities, such as in-store inventory management, in-store order preparation, or warehouse management.

Technical Modularity of Orisha Retail Chains

Technical modularity offers retailers a robust infrastructure to rapidly and securely extend or adapt existing functionalities, following defined technical rules that ensure long-term integrity and performance. This approach also simplifies future upgrades. For instance, it might involve modifying the standard in-store checkout process or updating a connector to comply with new tax regulations in specific countries.