The evolution of retail store into an experience center

The evolution of retail store into an experience center

by | Jan 20, 2022 | Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

With more and more customers looking to digital channels for product information, feedback, and insights, the role of the store is changing from a place that simply houses and transacts products to another integral step in building and differentiating customer experience. While this transformation has been taking place these past several years, the recent impact to in-person sales has accelerated the discussion for more retailers in what the role of the retail store will be in the future. Customer experience has been top of mind for retailers for years, but experience means different things to different people. In-store experience for a fashion retailer is dramatically different from that of a grocery store, however, this is something that each retailer has to define for their business. Microsoft sets out to help retailers bridge the gap between customer expectation and delivered experience. By utilizing the intelligent and connected tools available in Microsoft Dynamics 365, retailers can streamline the buying journey and ensure consistent and personalized customers experience across all relevant channels.

Dynamics 365 Commerce combined with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables retailers to streamline in-store practices and bring relevant customer data to sales agents, when and where needed, to deliver real-time personalization for customers in-store.

Transforming retail experiences to meet customer’s expectations

Mattress Firm is a great example of a retailer that has redefined their role as part of the customer sleep journey. By moving their focus from selling mattresses, to helping customers gain a better night’s sleep, it transformed their perspective on the experiences needed in store to reflect this focus.

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“Customers are just asking for these elevated retail experiences, and all of these things require technology, data or both.”Jonathan Sider, CIO and COO of e-commerce, Mattress Firm.

To evolve the retail store, organizations need to deliver more robust, sensory experiences and personalized customer service. The main ways through which this can be accomplished are personalization, seamless purchasing, and expanded in-store experiences.

The value of data and personalization

Consumers today respond better to personalized experiences. In the context of brick-and-mortar retail, this means being able to connect a customer’s online activities and past purchases with an in-store team member. One means of effective personalization is to deliver customer intelligence data, such as tailored recommendations, to the point in the customer journey where this information will have the greatest impact, such as point of sale (POS) terminals in-store or to sales associate handheld devices. Automation in the retail store is about improving the customer journey while also simplifying and removing as many low-value manual processes as possible from team member responsibilities, such as inventory management, ordering, and fulfillment.

Retailers like GNC are looking to Microsoft and Dynamics 365 to help meet and exceed customer expectations at every touchpoint.

a woman standing on a sidewalk

“We expect to provide our customers with a highly personalized experience tailored to their wellness journey. Whether they’re an 18-year-old high school athlete or a 70-year-old retiree, we want them to get the right message about products, programs, or deals that will appeal to them. We chose Customer Insights because with it, we have the data infrastructure to really do that right.”—Lauren Mannetti, Vice President, Marketing, GNC.

These forms of automation have rapidly become vital to providing the seamless omnichannel experience that customers demand. But, as we’ve discussed before in our Exceed customer expectations with seamless and unified commerce experiences blog post, this requires connecting data across back-end systems, which companies often overlook while focusing on their front-end process and online sales channels.

Seamless, frictionless purchasing is now an expectation

Consumers have mostly moved away from cash and now desire a fast, contactless, friction-free buying processideally without lines. For retail, this requires truly “instant checkout,” which means: Scan. Pay. Done. No lines. No hassle. No wait. The entire process occurs through the mobile point of sale application on a phone or tablet. Combining this with checkout stations and roaming team members positioned throughout the stores allows customers to bag their purchases and go on their way.

Customers like LIDS are using Dynamics 365 Commerce to get out from behind the counter and engage with customers in the isles with a user-friendly, touch-based point of sale device. With a wide variety of products and sizes, transactions are smoother when the employee can work with a customer and look up what’s in stock right from the sales floor.

“Our greatest assets are our store employees and managers, they care about the POS, and they want technology. When they walk into the store and see something that’s not a touchscreen, they kind of disconnect.”Nick Corthier, Chief Financial Officer, Lids.

Dynamics 365 also simplifies the payment experience with native integration with payment providers like Adyen, thereby enabling an easy and truly unified commerce solution for retailers.

Expanding in-store experiences

It’s up to every retailer to define what the role of their stores will be given the range and variety of retail offerings. One thing is for sure, retailers that adapt quicker are more likely to create differentiated value in the market and ultimately define what the future of their ‘retail vertical’ should look like. Technology is helping these retail leaders set the pace and standing up new models and raising the bar, especially for premium brands.

Gibson Brands is looking to lead the way in building a best-in-class retail experience for music enthusiasts. Gibson Garage, a new entertainment and retail outlet in downtown Nashville, features digitally fueled in-store experiences for customers. The Gibson Garage allows customers to see the guitar they’re buying, hear somebody play it, get excited about their purchase, and enjoy the entire music-centered hangout experience, complete with musicians and iconic gorgeous instruments. It becomes a place that musicians and music lovers alike want to gather and spend time; the way book lovers would a bookstore and caf.

Gibson Guitar store with guitars hanging on the wall

“Our legacy systems were unstable, unsustainable, and not optimized for the current ways of working…They weren’t talking to each other. Dynamics 365 has brought the company to the leading edge of technology in terms of enterprise resource planning (ERP). It’s stepped up our game and unlocked so many possibilities that we’re just scratching the surface. We’re continually going through, refining processes, and unlocking different aspects of the ERP to figure out what works for us in a system.”Mallory McClain, Dealer Service Supervisor, Gibson Brands.

These are examples of combining theatre-like retail settings, personalization, and automation to create a retail sales experience that is differentiated and pushes the boundaries of what we typically think of as shopping.

What’s next?

Many companies have merged data across disparate systems to rise to the new expectations of retail as an experience. These merchants have made investments in technology to move to an integrated unified commerce solution, like Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Visit our Dynamics 365 retail page to learn how Dynamics 365 can help you deliver on your customers’ expectations by evolving your retail experiences and how Microsoft can support your business for growth.

The post The evolution of retail store into an experience center appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Google Releases Security Updates for Chrome

by | Jan 20, 2022 | Security, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Google has released Chrome version 97.0.4692.99 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.

CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Chrome Release Note and apply the necessary update as soon as possible.

Cisco Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products

Cisco Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products

by | Jan 20, 2022 | Security, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

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Runbook to manage Azure Firewall Back ups

Runbook to manage Azure Firewall Back ups

by | Jan 19, 2022 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Azure Firewall is a managed stateful network security service that recently became generally available for premium features across most Azure regions, providing capabilities such as TLS inspection, URL filtering and more


Across the different virtual networks and subscriptions, rules are created for network segmentation and access control. Managing the network traffic may require you to audit rules for utilization, flow hit count or require a previous working configuration.


This runbook will help create instantaneous back-up copies of Azure Firewall with the Firewall Policy and when scheduled with an automation account, you can take daily/weekly snapshots and store them in a specified path.


For this runbook, Azure blob storage will be used to store Azure Firewall configuration for both network infrastructure and firewall policy at the time of the dump. You can edit the template to specify another storage method. We also discuss how to redeploy a firewall to a known configuration using one of the backed-up templates. For more information on other network resources that you may like to adapt to this runbook, please see the Export-AzResourceGroup module.



Requirements



  • Automation account

  • Storage Account

  • Runbook


 


Set up Automation account


Go to the Search bar and type Automation account. Create a New Automation account. When done, go to the Automation account and in the Settings blade, under Account settings, create a “Run As” account. This provide the service principal access that will be used to auto-login into our script later.


tobiotolorin_0-1642610140453.png


This runbook is a PowerShell module and we need to confirm that we have access to network and resources modules. On the Automation account blade which you have just created, go to Modules and then search the Gallery to import the following three requisites:


– Az.Account


– Az.Network


– Az.Resources


tobiotolorin_1-1642610193540.png


Create Storage account


Next, we create a storage account to store each back-up created in Azure Blob storage. Go to the search bar for resources and search for Storage Account. Create a Storage account. Select Cool storage mode


tobiotolorin_2-1642610219475.png


Next, we create the Runbook.


On the Automation account blade, click on Runbooks and create one. Here below, I have created AzFwBackUp.


tobiotolorin_3-1642610262929.png


 


After creating the runbook, copy the code from our Azure Network Security Github repository and paste it in line one. This code has three functions: 1. Create storage, 2. Export the firewall configuration, and save in the storage, and 3. Purge the older backups. It uses the Get-AzFirewall and Get-AzFirewallPolicy cmdlet to create snapshot instances.


 


Click Save and then click on Test Plane.


tobiotolorin_4-1642610311710.png


 


On the next page, you will be prompted for a few parameters which you have set up earlier:



  • Provide the resource group name, Azure Firewall name and Firewall Policy name, obtainable in your Resource group

  • Provide storage account name that was created in the step earlier above and the storage key.  The storage key can be obtained under “Access Keys” in the Storage Account blade (see image below).

  • Give it a Blob container name and specify a retention date. Back-ups older than this date will be deleted at next run.


tobiotolorin_5-1642610351313.png


 


Test the script


Click Start to begin the dry run to confirm you can store a copy of the current configuration. Once done, you can then proceed to create a schedule to make this run periodically.


tobiotolorin_7-1642610388322.png


 The back-up should be available in your Storage -> Container in .json format.


 


Create a schedule


To create a schedule, go to the Runbook that was created, at the Runbook blade, select Schedules -> Add a Schedule. Give it a name and select “Recurring” Configure for every week or month.


tobiotolorin_8-1642610470056.png


Click to “Link the schedule to the runbook.” Select the runbook you have created and then click “Configure parameters and run settings,” Fill this form as done earlier.


The Runbook should now be all set to create back-ups in. json template that may be used to restore the firewall to an earlier configuration. The storage account should now store your back-ups as specified.


tobiotolorin_9-1642610536508.png


 


Restore Azure Firewall


To restore an Azure firewall (firewall infrastructure and firewall policy) to an earlier configuration, run the following syntax in your Cloud shell:


 

New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -name $azurefirewallname -ResourceGroupName $resourcegroupname -TemplateFile $filepath

 


 


Note that Rule Collection Groups or RCGs are treated as dependency objects and these objects cannot be deployed in parallel. Collection groups all reference the policy as dependant (dependsOn in the arm template).


This means it will first update policy and then try to update all rule collection groups in parallel. This may fail due to the policy dependency issue. (This is currently by ARM (Azure Resource Manager) design and a roadmap item).


Hence, rule collection groups must be deployed one after the other using the “depends on” tag in your firewall backup file.


As an example, the Rule Collection Group would have to be edited using the rule processing order.


The format is to first specify the Firewall Policy name, then Policy RCG object.


 


 

      "type": "Microsoft.Network/firewallPolicies/ruleCollectionGroups",

      "apiVersion": "2020-11-01",

      "name": "SOC-NS-FWPolicy_premium/DefaultNetworkRuleCollectionGroup",

      "location": "westus2",

      "dependsOn": [

        "[resourceId('Microsoft.Network/firewallPolicies', 'SOC-NS-FWPolicy_premium')]",

   "[resourceId('Microsoft.Network/firewallPolicies/ruleCollectionGroups', 'SOC-NS-FWPolicy_premium','DefaultDnatRuleCollectionGroup')]"

      ]

 


 


(Also, confirm that the KeyVault information is not missing after the redeployment is complete)


 


In summary, you may need to export firewall settings when creating child policies, restoring from a wrong configuration, auditing rules etc. By setting up frequent back up schedule, you can create a historical record of your configuration.
For more information about Azure firewall use cases and governance information, see the Azure Network Security TechCommunity blog  





Dynamics 365 helps build the retail supply chain of the future

Dynamics 365 helps build the retail supply chain of the future

by | Jan 19, 2022 | Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Earlier in 2021, we had discussed how retailers can create an intelligent supply chain to successfully navigate through the disruptions and quickly adapt to changing customer behavior. As our retail customers embarked on the journey to create a resilient and intelligent supply chain, there were three key areas that emerged where our customers prioritized their investmentsoptimizing fulfillment, predicting supply chain risks, and enhancing supply chain visibility. Let’s take a look at some of Microsoft’s recent innovations in these areas that enable retailers to create a supply chain of the future.

Turning order fulfillment into a competitive advantage

A retailer’s success hinges on having the right inventory at the right place at the right time. As retailers and brands continue to adapt to meeting the growing e-commerce demand, determining where the inventory is fulfilled for e-commerce versus in-store orders becomes critical to ensure that customer demands are met on time and in a profitable manner.

As a recent Gartner report found, one of the ways to achieve supply chain excellence is by holding distribution center inventory in a channel-agnostic manner for flexible use of inventory to fulfill online and in-store demand effectively1. To achieve this level of flexibility, retailers need a system that offers rules-based order orchestration leveraging AI and real-time omnichannel inventory data to proactively address constraints and profitably fulfill orders on time and in full.

At Microsoft, we are at the forefront of these efforts, investing in solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management that help retailers reimagine the future of global supply chains and turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage.

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Predict risk and enhance visibility with AI-powered insights

According to Gartner, 76 percent of supply chain executives indicated that compared to three years ago, their company today faces more frequent disruptions in their supply chain. Meanwhile, another 72 percent reported that the impact of disruptive events has increased.2

Retailers have made significant strides in 2021 to create resiliency in their supply chains but the response has still been very reactive in nature. Slow digitization of the supply chain continues to inhibit organizations from proactively planning for changing customer demand and supply challenges. With an increase in e-commerce, it is imperative to gain real-time visibility into inventory at every node of the supply chain, all the way from the manufacturer to shipping ports to distribution centers to stores and finally to the consumer. Brands gain affinity when they consistently deliver on their order promise to their customers.

With this need for increased visibility and consistency in mind, we recently launched Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights in preview that enables organizations to predict risks in their supply chain based on news, weather, geo-political events, etc., and enables them to make better supply chain decisions with proactive risk mitigation via prescriptive insights powered by AI.

With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, retailers and consumer goods companies can create a digital representation of their physical supply chain. This enables them to simulate different scenarios at different nodes along the value chain and make well-informed decisions to mitigate any disruption. They can further gain visibility into the supply chains of their multiple tiers of suppliers, and improve the effectiveness of their demand and supply planning to ensure a delightful customer experience.

We also made significant enhancements to the Inventory Visibility add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Retailers can now get near real-time inventory visibility across all their internal channels and disparate third-party supply chain systems in a single place. Adding multiple systems in a scalable manner allows them to add new third-party integrations as they grow their supplier network or acquire new businesses. The enhanced visibility enables businesses to proactively mitigate any out-of-stock situations. Furthermore, they can perform soft reservations based on omnichannel sales demand so that they do not incorrectly commit to a customer.

Retailers can further leverage enhanced planning capabilities to enable near real-time inventory planning by prioritizing certain orders over others with ease. For example, they can prioritize orders for products that are low on stock versus the ones that are not. Lastly, retailers can optimize and streamline back-of-house operations like receiving and replenishment using the Warehouse Management mobile app. The mobile app empowers distribution centers, warehouses, and brick-and-mortar locations to make inventory decisions like transferring goods from one location to another simply by scanning the items. By running critical warehouse operations on Edge, retailers can ensure business continuity across all locations despite latency or network issues at HQ.

All the supply chain solutions from Dynamics 365 are not only interoperable with each other but also seamlessly work with other third-party ERP, commerce, and supply chain systems.

Take the Supply Chain Visibility Guided Tour to see how a retailer can enhance supply chain visibility using Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

Here are some recent examples of our retail customers who have created a resilient supply chain this past year using Dynamics 365.

Servis Industries Limited powers direct-to-consumer expansion by moving to the cloud

Established more than 50 years ago, Servis Industries Limited (SIL) is a leading manufacturer and exporter in Pakistan. To achieve its goal of becoming a global, world-class, and diversified company, SIL moved its on-premises infrastructure to the cloud by adopting Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Commerce. Now, the company has a holistic overview of its retail stores and an infrastructure management system that can support rapid national and international growth.

“To achieve our goal, we need to open 40 to 50 outlets per year. It used to be that with each new store, our team had to be on-site to provide technical support. Now, everything is cloud-based, so we don’t have to travel. The new stores can just access the systems and start their operations almost immediately.”Faisal Rizvi, Head of IT, Servis Industries Limited.  

Another challenge that SIL encountered in its journey was the need to meet the evolving customer expectation for personalized engagement, omnichannel experiences, and frictionless interactions. For this, the company turned to Distributed Order Management to deliver smooth order processing between its e-commerce platform and physical stores and to optimize order fulfillment across their network by utilizing AI, automation, and real-time inventory.

Khaadi delivers rapid omnichannel success

Founded in 1998, Khaadi is Pakistan’s premier fashion retailer with more than 70 physical stores across Pakistan, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the United Kingdom, and online stores in more than 12 countries. With its growing network of physical and online storefronts, the company needed a solution that could streamline its omnichannel sales delivery and empower its daily operations with actionable store-level insights for managers. The drive towards omnichannel was forced into overdrive when pandemic lockdowns moved all of Khaadi’s operations online. Suddenly, they needed to pivot to leverage a single inventory across the business and use their stores as fulfillment hubs.

To meet this challenge, Khaadi turned to Microsoft Power Apps and Power BI, alongside Dynamics 365 Commerce, Dynamics 365 Finance, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. With this technology in place, Khaadi successfully transitioned to omnichannel.

“We were able to draw up a blueprint for omnichannel sales rapidly and implemented a complete enterprise-level scenario in just in one weekend. IT was able to transform the dynamics of our business within just a week’s time, making Khaadi a truly omnichannel enabled retailer. From there, it was only a matter of three months before we scaled the roll out ten times with help of Dynamics 365 Commerce Distributed Order Management.”Muhammad Rehan Qadri, Chief Information Officer, Khaadi.

As you can see by these recent customer success stories, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping companies to deliver the retail supply chain of the future by empowering direct-to-consumer expansion and accelerating omnichannel success.

What’s next?

The events of the past two years have made it essential for businesses to invest in technology that can help them sense supply chain constraints and disruptions and predict spikes and troughs in demand. Microsoft Dynamics 365 assists companies in integrating these types of new capabilities, such as real-time, end-to-end visibility, priority-based planning, and AI-empowered insights so that they can effectively compete in this new normal. As we have seen here, this can take the form of accelerating direct-to-consumer and omnichannel success, empowering retailers to turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage, and integrating advanced warehousing solutions to improve distribution processes.  

To learn more, join the Ask the Experts session on how to automate and optimize fulfillment on Tuesday, January 25, 2022, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. You can watch the on-demand webinar on how to create a resilient and sustainable supply chain and the total economic impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. You can also watch the on-demand webinar on how to enhance the visibility of your supply chain by taking a composable approach to rapidly deploy a Supply Chain Control Tower.

Sources:

1- Gartner: The Contemporary Guide to Retail Supply Chain Excellence: Part 1 Inventory and Assortment Published 22 November 2021 – ID G00743960

2- Gartner, Six Ways Supply Chain Analytics Mitigate Business Disruptions, 2021

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Dynamics 365 helps build the retail supply chain of the future appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

CISA Adds 13 Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

by | Jan 18, 2022 | Security, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

CISA has added 13 new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence that threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerabilities listed in the table below. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.

CVE Number CVE Title Required Action Due Date
CVE-2021-32648 October CMS Improper Authentication 2/1/2022
CVE-2021-21315 System Information Library for node.js Command Injection Vulnerability 2/1/2022
CVE-2021-21975 Server Side Request Forgery in vRealize Operations Manager API Vulnerability 2/1/2022
CVE-2021-22991 BIG-IP Traffic Microkernel Buffer Overflow Vulnerability 2/1/2022
CVE-2021-25296 Nagios XI OS Command Injection Vulnerability 2/1/2022
CVE-2021-25297 Nagios XI OS Command Injection Vulnerability 2/1/2022
CVE-2021-25298 Nagios XI OS Command Injection Vulnerability 2/1/2022
CVE-2021-33766 Microsoft Exchange Server Information Disclosure Vulnerability 2/1/2022
CVE-2021-40870 Aviatrix Controller Unrestricted Upload of File Vulnerability 2/1/2022
CVE-2020-11978 Apache Airflow Command Injection Vulnerability 7/18/2022
CVE-2020-13671 Drupal Core Unrestricted Upload of File Vulnerability 7/18/2022
CVE-2020-13927 Apache Airflow Experimental API Authentication Bypass Vulnerability 7/18/2022
CVE-2020-14864 Oracle Corporate Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Path Traversal Vulnerability 7/18/2022

Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities established the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog as a living list of known CVEs that carry significant risk to the federal enterprise. BOD 22-01 requires FCEB agencies to remediate identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect FCEB networks against active threats. See the BOD 22-01 Fact Sheet for more information.

Although BOD 22-01 only applies to FCEB agencies, CISA strongly urges all organizations to reduce their exposure to cyberattacks by prioritizing timely remediation of Catalog vulnerabilities as part of their vulnerability management practice. CISA will continue to add vulnerabilities to the Catalog that meet the meet the specified criteria.