Last week I attended a conference in Barcelona, Spain. The conference was focused on the future of supply chain in a cross-channel world. The event covered an international view (I presented as part of that), a more local view, and then a focus on enablers, with presentations by Deloitte, Supply Nexus (these two were the conference organizers) along with Demandware, Heiler, Manhattan Associates, Metapack, and Revionics. The room was standing-room only for over 50 executives hailing from retailers across southern Europe, from startups to retail industry titans.

The conversations at the event were great, but some of the side conversations during the break and the dinner the night before were even better. It was such a diverse set of topics that we covered – reflecting the transformative nature of cross-channel changes – that it’s nearly impossible to organize them. Here are the things that stuck with me:

Flexible Fulfillment. Just like stores, fulfillment centers are feeling a wave of transformative change, except instead of “too many” as many retailers face with their current store count, retailers may need more fulfillment centers, not less. And like stores, they may need to be smaller and more flexible. Jose Luis Rodriguez of Supply Nexus presented a future where a very small number of large-scale distribution centers are supported by a lot of smaller, multi-function fulfillment centers. These centers may fulfill to stores, to consumer homes, or be positioned as consumer-facing pick-up locations. Some retailers, like Nordstrom, are rethinking the additional services that need to be attached to the logistics group, for example by stationing product photography at the DC, so that if there are any discrepancies between the actual product that arrives for selling vs. the original image created as part of a product specification, the retailer can fix the problem right on the spot – reducing unnecessary returns and increasing sales opportunities by immediately updating the website.

It would seem that this would be a more expensive way to support a retail business, but the reality of the rapidly approaching Zero Hour in supply chain may make flexible fulfillment a requirement, and not an option. What is the Zero Hour? It’s the delivery time that makes it possible for “shipped” fulfillment to obliterate the store differentiation of instant gratification. In other words, if you are standing in a store with a product in your hand and you find it cheaper online, what kind of delivery timeframe vs. price difference makes you willing to wait? At what point is the price difference irrelevant in most cases? If you could get the product next-day? How about in four hours? How about in two hours?

A lot of store-based retailers seem to be unaware of the increasing need for speed. It’s no longer okay to ship an item five days after an order is received. And pretty soon it’s not going to be acceptable to consumers to ship in three days. Ambitious online retailers like Amazon are offering same-day ship if the order is confirmed before a specified time of day – and that time of day is getting later and later. And with Amazon seemingly aggressively pursuing more localized fulfillment centers – not unlike the kind that Jose Luis has been mulling over – their ability to reach that Zero Hour by enabling same-day fulfillment for certain products seems to be just around the corner.

Closer to the front-end of the supply chain, I had my thoughts on Product Information Management reshaped by Marcus Pannier of Heiler, a company that provides PIM alongside Digital Asset Management (DAM). In my presentation, I had grouped PIM together with Distributed Order Management (DOM, not to be confused with DAM) because I was thinking about them in purely a supply chain context, but Marcus reminded me that these days there is a lot more information associated with products than just the specifications used by the supply chain. While RSR has talked a lot about Content in the context of our five C’s, fundamentally that content is associated with pretty much only three things: product, customer, or location.

While everyone these days seems to acknowledge that product reviews, for example, are almost a base requirement for retail, they have not historically been used as product attributes per se. But as social media becomes more and more established as part of a shopping process, retailers are increasingly interested in trying to leverage social media-based content, like review commentary, as part of a demand prediction. Which means that common phrases used as part of reviews, for example “the size runs large” may very well need to become part of the product’s attributes. And the images associated with products – as Nordstroms has learned – can be as much a causal factor for returns as inaccurate product descriptions.

Between Henri Seroux of Manhattan Associates and Jeff Smith of Revionics, the conference also delved into the combination of demand and price as a lever of demand. Henri talked specifically about the fashion vertical, and the tremendous value in being able to tap into the products “sleeping in stores” and connecting them to demand wherever it might exist. Coupled with Jeff’s notion of connecting price and assortment not just to a product’s lifecycle, but the lifecycle of a product across channels, you get a new level of optimization that has not historically been possible. And retailers may think that cracking open this kind of opportunity is more expensive than the benefit, but in my experience, especially for fashion retail, they’re wrong. Dead wrong.

Finally, Laurent Peron of Demandware made a case for cloud-supported platforms for customer engagement. Particularly for digital touchpoints, my perception is that cloud-based solutions make the most sense, certainly from the standpoint of managing capacities. Increasingly, retailers are finding that online peaks are getting more and more concentrated, especially as their online reach expands around the world. Does it make sense to own that much capacity, when it only gets used once per year?

But even more than this – and retailers and solution providers alike should pay close attention – the one concept that resonated the most at the conference is the idea that retailers’ existing infrastructure and the resources required to support both these systems and the backlog of enhancements to these systems are by far the biggest barriers to creating a seamless cross-channel experience for customers. Cloud-based solutions are an easy answer for a line of business executive with money to spend and no time to waste on existing infrastructure. But if retailers can’t figure out how to make their existing IT investments, infrastructure, and organization much more relevant to future business success, all they will be doing is creating new silos. Sure, they may be easier to integrate, but when has a line of business executive ever wanted to pay for that? The fact that this was the concept that seemed to strike a nerve is a warning alarm for the whole industry. You can’t transform the business unless you’re willing to transform IT too. And that’s not just a warning for the business side of the house – that’s a warning for IT too.