The future of wholesale: How CIOs can manage their supplier and partner ecosystems to delight customers

Don’t underestimate the importance of your wholesale ecosystem

The ecosystem of suppliers, manufacturers, logistics providers, and other partners has long been a vital element in the success of wholesale operations. With the pandemic came new opportunities and new pressures on traditional wholesale operating models.

Now more than ever, the wholesale ecosystem is critical to meeting the changing needs of customers.

Investing across the ecosystem will pay off

• Ensuring effective communications, collaboration, and integration with suppliers, partners, and tech providers across the evolving wholesale ecosystem is becoming a critical competency for CIOs and digital leaders.
• Driving improvements in data quality, operational efficiency, security, and customer experience should be at the top of your list.
• Optimized ecosystems create value for all players to the ultimate benefit of the customer.

Learn how to tap into the value of your ecosystem

Join this roundtable for the latest thinking on wholesale ecosystems:

• Learn from other CIOs about their ecosystem strategies
• Discuss the barriers and obstacles to success
• Explore the possibilities for ‘quick wins’ with peers and industry thought leaders

Building the foundation for a new connected and efficient ecosystem

How is the retail/wholesale ecosystem is transforming to meet the needs of vast, interconnected communities of consumers, suppliers, partners and technology providers?

Businesses and IT Sponsors face several challenges:

• Even though retail/wholesale ecosystems will take separate channels and develop at distinct rates corresponding to the marketplace, they confront various choices about how and where to connect.
• Effective communications, collaboration, and integration with suppliers, partners, and technology providers across the evolving ecosystem are becoming critical for ensuring data quality, integrity, operational efficiency, and a secure environment.

“By 2035, around one-third of the global GDP – which would be more than half of the distribution part of the GDP – will be orchestrated by ecosystems. Almost $80 Trillion.” McKinsey, 2023

• Ascertain partnerships and critical drivers associated with ecosystem revolutions.
• Learn from other CIOs about their ecosystem strategies.
• Discuss the barriers and obstacles to success
• Explore the possibilities for ‘quick wins’ with peers and industry thought leaders

Approach to a new connected and efficient ecosystem

• Ascertain why enterprises must reimagine how they think about customers, suppliers, partners and technology providers to contribute successfully to ecosystems.
• Establish the road to creating a connected ecosystem with steps including necessary elements, designing, testing, implementing, and maintaining hyper-scale platforms.
• Evaluate the key components involving collaboration between different communities to create a shared infrastructure and services for the ecosystem.
• Uncover how the best-in-class retailers/wholesalers are already reaping business benefits by being an ecosystem player.
• Recognize cost and competitive prospects to capitalize on the ecosystem-based model.
• Realize the ecosystem scaling benefits for consumers, suppliers, partners and technology providers.

Leading ecosystems players leverage hyperscale technology platforms

Six of the world’s top seven companies are ecosystem companies

Awareness and Readiness

Ecosystems consist of connected services through which customers satisfy inter-connected needs in one integrated experience. A precise ecosystem formulation can recreate both scale and address challenging capabilities via partnerships.

Leading ecosystems came into existence through dominant technology companies, which have leveraged hyper-scale platforms to compete with the offerings of traditional competitors by controlling customer user interfaces and touchpoints such as search, media, advertising, and messaging.

Businesses can take advantage by entering their new product and service categories with a higher level of profitability, as digitization and technology today enable end-to-end accessibility for consumers and their partners in the connected ecosystem.