STORES magazine: Cognizant Supports John Lewis’ Quest to be the U.K.’s Leading Omni-Channel Retailer

Paul Coby, IT Director, John Lewis, and Steven Skinner, VP - Consulting, Retail Practice, Cognizant

In a special feature about the once-traditional John Lewis investing in the future and recreating its retail ecosystem, STORES magazine highlights how Cognizant is helping the upmarket department store chain fully embrace the digital age and become the U.K.’s leading omni-channel retailer.

“We needed a strong platform on which we could build and expand our current offering, putting the customer at the center of our operations,” says Paul Coby, John Lewis’ IT director. “Our philosophy has really been to develop the business, keeping a keen eye on what’s working as we go, rather than investing lots of time and money beforehand. It was important to us to develop the omni-channel business based on what we were learning over time. Understanding what’s working has led to the big investments we’ve made more recently—and will continue to make—as we look to cement John Lewis’ omni-business.”

The magazine—which belongs to the National Retail Federation (NRF), the world’s largest retail trade association—reports that John Lewis is working closely with Cognizant to re-imagine the business and develop solutions for omni-channel retailing. “The path to omni-channel requires a consistent, single view of five core things: the customer, product availability, inventory and orders across the enterprise and a unified payment infrastructure,” says Steven Skinner, retail practice vice president with Cognizant Business Consulting. “Without those five things, you cannot present a consistent experience to a customer.”

Cognizant, the magazine points out, has helped John Lewis identify those core capabilities, and then determine “the multitude of stepping stones needed to enable them to get where they are today.” “Creating great experiences for customers is a hallmark of John Lewis and it’s the key characteristic of omni-channel retail,” says Skinner, adding that what really sets John Lewis apart from its competitors is a commitment to “retail without boundaries”.

“Customers don’t really care anymore where they are engaging with a retailer…they’ve been trained that they can engage with John Lewis from their home, while they’re running around Hyde Park or standing in…their local store,” he says. “Their expectation is that John Lewis can bring all of their capabilities to bear to service their desire and provide a full customer experience on the spot.”

The magazine writes that Cognizant’s work with John Lewis is ongoing and spans multiple areas: Cognizant performs testing for all the solutions the retailer puts into the marketplace. In addition, Cognizant has worked with John Lewis on the architecture needed to increase the speed of deploying marketplace solutions and support its e-commerce environment. Cognizant is also directly involved in supporting John Lewis’ order management program.

“If you don’t have a distributed customer order management capability to optimize inventory across channels and provide transparency and visibility to customer orders across channels, then you can’t execute an omni-channel world. It’s critical,” Skinner says. “One of the key things we’re avowed to is innovations and trying new things,” says Coby. “Whatever emerges as the next shopping habit, it’s our job to anticipate those trends and act quickly to respond to customer demand.”

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