With the prestigious IBM Excellence Award, Lightwell is being recognized for its exceptional performance, innovative solutions, and outstanding services around the IBM Sterling portfolio.

During the IBM Think 2020 digital conference this week, Lightwell was awarded the 2020 IBM Excellence Award for “IBM Sterling Business Partner of the Year.”

The IBM 2020 Excellence Awards recognize IBM Business Partners across the world who have exceeded expectations and delivered enhanced levels of business growth and innovation to clients.

This award recognizes Lightwell as the outstanding IBM Sterling Business Partner for delivering exceptional services, solutions, and support, along with superior performance and results in 2019. 

If you haven't already, mark your calendars: Think 2020 is still happening! From May 5–6, 2020, everyone around the world can participate in this digital event experience from the comfort and safety of home.

What’s even better, it's absolutely free for you to join. 

While our team is truly going miss the excitement of the live event and connecting with our clients, partners, and friends in-person this time around, IBM is going a great job making the most of the event given the realities we're facing.

We hope you'll join us in participating in this event.  Here's the scoop.

As many of us rushed to find just the right gifts and have them in-hand in time for our holiday gatherings this year, we experienced first-hand the importance of retail stores in the overall omnichannel order fulfillment experience.

In some cases, after ordering online and opting to pick up in store, everything went smoothly and we had what we needed in-hand quickly, as expected. Wonderful! Everyone’s happy, right? (Unless your gift recipient is just that impossibly picky).

In other situations, we waited in long lines to pick up our orders or stood frustrated at the customer service desk as a frazzled store associate struggled to locate an item we ordered online for pickup in-store.

When I experienced this last week, it seemed that the retailer's online inventory information didn’t reflect reality, and there was no indication of a problem until I arrived to pick up my order.  After 30 minutes of watching multiple store associates making phone calls, getting help from managers, and running around the store looking for misplaced inventory, I had to cancel my purchase and found another retailer that had what I needed. It may be a while before I choose the "Buy Online, Pick up in Store" (BOPIS) option from that retailer again. 

Sound familiar? I hope not, but chances are, you have dealt with this type of frustration at some point.  Let’s explore the good and the bad of the in-store experience in Omnichannel, and why store enablement is so important.

With the right file transfer capabilities and processes in place, you can simplify and enhance your interactions with customers, suppliers, and other trading partners—to the point where the business benefits help to accelerate you past your competition.

At a high level, speeding partner onboarding, reducing the time and effort involved in partner management, improving security and compliance, and enabling greater visibility—all can play a key role in driving increased revenue and customer satisfaction.

Let’s take a closer look at how this works.

Business growth can be a double-edged sword. While increased revenues are never frowned upon, the downside manifests itself in the burgeoning data volumes that the organization must manage—particularly files that must be transferred between the organization, its customers, and its partners.

These challenges add reliability issues, compliance concerns, and security risks related to moving data, as well as challenges managing the volume and size of files moving through the systems.

As partner networks grow, companies find themselves managing multiple solutions for file transfer—and lack visibility from end to end. The typical enterprise supports three or more file transfer platforms—and as a result, have many disjointed file transfer processes and blind spots. This severely limits their ability to support the company’s growth initiatives effectively. 

However, enterprises that leverage a managed file transfer solution can gain critical capabilities for enabling—even driving growth. A centralized, enterprise-grade managed file transfer (MFT) platform allows for full visibility into file transfers and provides a better user experience for line of business users and partners alike. It also includes the security and audit trail capabilities necessary in today’s ever-changing alphabet soup of regulations, from PCI-DSS to Sarbanes-Oxley and beyond. Let’s explore this a bit.

Omnichannel order fulfillment is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have multiple methods for fulfilling customer orders, and customers can choose whether they want orders shipped to them or picked up in store. This flexibility helps to make customers happy.

On the other hand, retailers have seen upwards of a 300 percent increase in what it costs to serve omnichannel customers. 

According to the Retail Industry Leader Association’s annual survey, as reported in Supply Chain Quarterly, executives identified controlling supply chain costs as a top priority, with order fulfillment and omnichannel costs being a part of the reason.

The good news is that tools exist to help reduce omnichannel order fulfillment costs and complexity. These tools leverage advanced capabilities like artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, and predictive analytics to optimize order fulfillment processes.

The transparency provided by these tools can help companies drastically reduce the cost to serve their omnichannel customers while still meeting consumer expectations of speedy delivery.

While there is no magic bullet to cost reduction, let’s take a look at three ways companies can use these advanced capabilities to improve the way they fulfill orders.

Managed file transfer solutions are gaining traction, particularly in financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare organizations. According to Research and Markets, the global managed file transfer (MFT) market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 6 percent from 2017 to 2025 as more companies adopt these solutions.

However, adopting MFT technology isn’t enough; organizations need to make sure they back up the technology with a strategy that aligns with the organization’s goals, compliance needs, and end users.

The organizations that are most successful with MFT include five key pillars in their strategy. These underpin the technology with user adoption and confidence, allowing MFT to become as much a part of the organization as sending email—but more secure, and with better results. From introducing standardization in the technology itself to making sure end users know the how and why of MFT, highly effective MFT strategies include the following: