Johannesburg, 16 Apr 2020
The recent COVID-19-fuelled rush on retailers in South Africa, as consumers started stockpiling grocery staples, is leaving many shelves empty. Some, such as Makro, have recently announced they will be “enforcing customer limits on shoppers … to give customers fair access to essential items”.
Morne Laubscher, CTO of Logicalis South Africa, comments: “Both online and brick-and-mortar retailers are experiencing a run on products, which is limiting their ability to service the needs of their entire customer base.”
Retailers have the data they need for customer buying patterns but often aren’t always able to access the benefits. The 2019 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis, a global provider of IT solutions which questioned 888 CIOs from around the globe, found that just under one in ten (9%) of respondents believe their organisation is very successful at understanding the advantages of AI technology in some areas of business; whereas 44% believe their organisation is not very successful at all.
“Implementing technology with machine learning capabilities will provide retailers with the ability to run insightful analytics and augment this data with trends from other markets already dealing with this crisis. This gives them the ability to predict behaviours and stabilise supply chains,” he says.
He adds this information can inform better decision-making, cost containment strategies and how to prioritise the delivery of certain products over those currently less likely to be in demand.
“We don’t know how long and to what extent COVID-19 is going to affect South African business, but we do know it is having a significant impact on the way companies will need to change the way they operate,” says Laubscher. “And using the technology and data that the business already has, and perhaps adding other solutions to augment functionality, will create resilience and the ability to adapt in line with consumer demands during this challenging time.”
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Logicalis South Africa
Logicalis SA (Pty) Limited is the South African subsidiary of the Logicalis Group. At Logicalis we pride ourselves in our ability to advise customers on their IT strategy, implement the most appropriate technology from a wide range of leading vendors and manage their technology infrastructures on their behalf. At every stage we make our customers’ businesses sharper by removing cost, complexity and barriers to change across their IT infrastructures.
We serve our customers’ global requirements through our extensive partner network. Formed in 2017 Logicalis SA today has over 140 employees. We currently supply services to 40+ offshore international customers, supporting and maintaining cloud solutions, servers, storage, IPT and network devices.
Our range of end-to-end technology-based solutions embracing infrastructure, service management and applications services represents our ‘core’ business. We tailored these solutions to customer demands to include end user management, infrastructure and networks (data and voice) support, database managed services, applications management and service desk services. Our solutions and services are delivered through either on-site support teams or remotely, using a well-defined and proven set of ITIL service management practices and methodologies.