In addition, Target can also consider building other customer relationships, such as offering subscription services on its apparel, a key category for the company. Clear up technical debt — Many of us remember the data breach at Target, and I think outdated IT systems is a common occurrence at non-technical, large companies. There is usually a lot of technical debt with internal systems as funds are historically used at retailers for building stores and marketing costs.
Target must be willing to allocate funds for the long but necessary process of improving internal systems. Allocating to IT means less funds for other divisions, and shareholders may also push back on these investments that take longer-term to realize.
Thus, management must conduct rigorous ROI calculations for the investments, prioritize the most important and urgent ones, and communicate the important of a longer-term perspective. Change to digital-first culture to attract talent — Target must overcome its image as a slow-moving incumbent and demonstrate its digital-first culture to attract the engineering and technical talent often younger employees who often prefer the technology industry.
A good first start is that Target has partnered Techsstars, a startup accelerator, to create a retail accelerator program in Minneapolis. Target must start to develop its technical capabilities in-house instead of continuing to outsource.
Managing labor — However, corporate employees with traditional physical retail experience may feel threatened by tremendous focus on digital innovations and move to e-commerce sales.
To combat this, Target must integrate digital and physical assets as one, and not pit the e-commerce team against the in-store retail team. Performance incentives can reward their cooperation and emphasize overall sales. Similarly, in-store employees may find their job roles changing as the store format and store purpose changes to add fulfillment and other skills. Although some employees may need to depart, there is value in the tenured, experienced employees and Target can invest in training the store employees with new skills which will motivate the employees to stay on often cheaper than acquiring new employees.
Although older employees may initially be intimidated or want to rely on their years of expertise and gut feeling, Target can offer more training to them and also get the employees involved in creating and launching pilot tests so they feel involved and see the feedback and results from using those tools. This will also help create a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement with feedback.
One example is that Target has invested in Domo, a business intelligence tool that the whole company, including senior management, use frequently, to help make real-time decisions. Log In Welcome, User. Coronavirus Minneapolis St. Paul Duluth St. Study: Mpls. Paul minimum wage increases led to loss of restaurant jobs. Blizzard warning continues in western Minn. Lake Minnetonka mansion, nearly completed, could be forced to relocate.
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A prescription if Karl-Anthony Towns is sick of losing: Play better. Business Target cuts innovation initiatives, including secretive Goldfish start-up Sliding sales has the retailer pulling back on innovation, including Goldfish start-up. By Kavita Kumar Star Tribune. Target's West Stringfellow. More from Star Tribune.
It will test them in the Minneapolis market, near its headquarters, and then scale up. Yet, Fiddelke said each digital transaction can't be measured in just dollars. When customers use the retailer's curbside pickup service, for example, he said they spend more at Target — not just online, but in stores.
Skip Navigation. Key Points. Target said in an earnings call Wednesday that it's looking to new technology and sort centers to help keep up with e-commerce demand and drive down costs. In this article. Such ambitious efforts come at a pivotal time for Target. The retailer has struggled to grow sales at its 1, stores in the United States as impatient and digital-savvy consumers flock to the Internet in search of deals, entertainment and convenience.
As a result, retailers are searching for new sources of growth through online, mobile and social media. Behind the scenes at Target, the cultural changes have been dramatic. A dedicated group of technology and business strategists now try to quickly test inventions in individual stores. Every day, about 50 employees flock to Hi Tech, a Genius Bar-like support center where specialists offer personal IT help.
We need each side to have a full seat at the table to bring the best together. With digital technology rapidly remolding the retail business, Target officials decided they needed two things: talent and speed. The former to create and evaluate technology and the latter to put that innovation to use in a quick manner.
Last year, the company opened a Technology Innovation Center in San Francisco, where they hope to recruit talented engineers and data scientists who can create next-generation mobile apps or smart ways to predict customer behavior. But just opening an innovation office that looks like a start-up hardly guarantees innovation, experts say.
What good are ideas if they never see the light of day? Target is a retail giant whose hundreds of thousands of employees carry their own agendas and incentives. Merchants based in corporate headquarters, not technologists working in a remote office, tend to wield the most clout in such large retailers, Spieckerman said. Building an office is easy. Building a risk-taking culture that encourages failure is much more difficult, especially for a large publicly traded company that answers to shareholders.
You need the knowledge exchange. Now they need to integrate that with their technology efforts. Target executives seem keenly aware of this. At the same time, Target holds Big Idea contests for employees, in which winners receive time and money to develop prototypes for their projects.
Of the submissions the company received during the last contest, four projects are in some stage of production.
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