Conference season marches on. This week I attended RedShift2012 (my first) in Hollywood, Fl. The event and presentations really gave me a lot of food for thought, and I think many of the ideas presented are applicable to all retailers. I’ve also got to give Red Prairie some props here. The company has transformed both its mission and its messaging to reflect 21^st century realities. Hence my feeling that “RedShift ” is more than just a catchy name. It’s a reality.

I confess when Red Prairie started acquiring companies I couldn’t see how the whole package would fit together. I was able to grasp workforce management easily enough, but extending into store performance management seemed like a stretch. I mean, the store is far more complex in many ways than distribution centers. Follow that on with a commerce engine and a clienteling app, and you’ve got me really scratching my head. But of course, that was before omni-channel (or as Red Prairie calls it ‘all-channel “) retailing took hold.

The retail world has changed dramatically and fundamentally in the past five years. Buy-anywhere, fulfill-anywhere, deliver-anywhere has turned the store into a node in the supply chain. And the labor required to fulfill from stores has to be managed, as do the tasks those workers perform. Inventory visibility across channels implies customer information is ALSO available across all channels. And as long as you’ve got that customer information, why NOT use it to support more direct and intimate contact with customers while they’re in your store. All of a sudden, the puzzle pieces start the fall into place.

So from my perspective, the Red Prairie portfolio has been nicely rationalized. But I’m even more interested in looking at this from a retailer perspective and ferreting through how we deal with not just converged channels, but converged responsibilities across the enterprise.

The Retail enterprise can no longer be divided into neat functional silos. We could argue whether or not those silos were ever accurate, but they served to help us go from chains with single and double digit numbers of stores within a country, to hundreds and thousands of selling locations, sometimes across the world. But they also served to isolate departments and compartmentalize domain knowledge in unfortunate ways. I have never forgotten something Professor Tom Allen told my class when I was in graduate school. He said, if employee workstations are more than 100 feet apart (I think it was 100 feet, it might have been 300, but you get the point) they might as well be across the country in terms of collaboration. And so when you see a corporate headquarters with the distribution center and its personnel in one building, merchandising in another, and IT on another floor of THAT building, you can be pretty well assured those three departments generally are challenged to work as a “cross-functional ” team.

Of course, as a founding member of a virtual company, I can attest that collaboration is definitely possible across the country – I finished graduate school 20 years ago and things have changed a lot in those years – but that collaboration is enabled by technology, and that’s the point of this ramble. Red Prairie’s planned architecture is a role-based interface, rather than an application-driven one. It’s de-siloed, really. We’ve seen this with dashboards before, but not really with a core transactional application suite.

In other words, to effectively manage his stores, the VP of Store Operations might well need to see the number of unfilled orders from the web and other direct channels, while the CFO might want to see aggregated inventory across all channels. The VP of logistics and transportation needs to see data from both store and warehouse receipts and shipments. Certainly much of the ‘after the fact’ data is exposed in data warehouses, but pulling directly from operational system helps the enterprise react in near-real-time. And, it’s a way to generate an understanding of relevancy. Most merchandising executives would glaze over at the term “transportation management system ” but their ears will perk up at “improving inventory turn “.

So, getting back to where I started from, Red Prairie has made a pretty neat “Shift ” over the past few years from a “supply chain company ” to a “commerce ” company. And while I don’t expect it to extend its footprint to core merchandising and pricing systems, I did come away really interested in seeing how well the company executes this “Shift ” in the coming months and years. I still have a couple of McHugh-Freeman business cards somewhere in an old Rolodex, but the company has come a really long way.

As an aside, the graphics and stage in the opening presentation was a technological marvel that I find myself at a loss to explain. 3D without the glasses is probably the shortest way to say it, but I also have to give props – it was spectacular. I can’t find any photos that do it justice.