Though the holiday shopping season brings excitement and opportunity to customers, it can bring undue stress to retailers as they try to keep up with the ever-rising demand of consumers. What many people do not realize is that it’s not just the stores themselves that feel the stress of the holiday shopping season: decorating the store, ordering extra merchandise, and implementing special holiday promotions.
The IT teams behind major retailers also feel incredible stress during the holiday shopping season. The IT team must ensure that the company’s computers can keep up with the increased amount of transactions and processing during the holiday season, not to mention keeping the company safe from data breaches.
According to Deloitte research, the 2014 holiday shopping season could see as much as $986 billion in total holiday revenues, a 4.5 percent increase over last year's sales from November through January. Furthermore, the firm forecasted that online sales levels will increase by up to 14 percent when compared to the previous season.
How can retailers handle this rush of transactions?
Enterprise job scheduling solutions allow retailers to automate the daily transactions and processes behind the business—tasks that don’t require human involvement, like file arrivals, online orders and processing—and schedule them to run automatically based on any necessary prerequisites. When retailers automate daily or repeatable tasks, their IT teams are free to focus on keeping systems and networks up and running to support the demand of the holiday season.
What’s more, an enterprise job scheduler like Automate Schedule includes security and auditing features that keep a retailer’s network secure during this busy time. Automate Schedule has role-based security options for the different members of the team who will access the schedule, meaning that a company’s processes are safe from unexpected or unwanted changes that could affect the function of the whole company.
Automation takes the complexity out of the holiday season. Even with high levels of holiday traffic, retailers can stay on top of transactions and save the energy of the IT team for more urgent network emergencies.