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Understand the capabilities and focus areas required to meet your industry’s needs and enable value creation.

Identify resource, process, and environmental trends impacting your industry. Implement strategies to mitigate specific risks and take advantage of all relevant opportunities.

Reveal the true state of your IT services, processes, spend, and staffing levels to align your priorities and resources.

Benefit from peer data to get a reference point for how well you stack up.

Arm yourself with everything you need to provide the right solutions to meet the needs of your business stakeholders.

Rahul Jaiswal
Principal Research Director, Retail & Wholesale
Info-Tech Research Group

• You are a CIO, head of EA, or chief architect who needs to improve the organization’s understanding of business capabilities and how IT can support them.
• The organization wants to sharpen its alignment and focus on organizational outcomes and value by using architecture to inform better its IT governance, stakeholder management, and IT strategy capabilities.
• The organization needs to validate and execute strategic initiatives by using this blueprint to understand how the organization creates value and the underlying capabilities and processes.

• Businesses don’t know where or how to begin or how to engage the right people, model the business, and drive the value of business architecture.
• Business and IT often speak in their own languages without a holistic and integrated view of missions, strategies, goals, processes, and projects.
• Business and IT often focus on a project, ignoring the holistic value of an overarching value stream and business capability view.

• Build your organization’s capability map by defining the organization’s value stream and validating the wholesale industry reference architecture.
• Leverage business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining the organization’s key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map.
• Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of business processes, information, applications, and technology support of key capabilities.
• Adopt capability-based strategy planning by the ongoing identification and road mapping of capability gaps.

Overarching Insight

Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central and has many benefits to organizational priorities. It's critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the enterprise, and more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line business outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.

Determine your organizational priority.

Many organizational priorities are dependent on an understanding of how the organization creates value and the organization's capabilities and processes.

Examine organizational opportunities through the lens of business, information/data, applications & technology.

Your understanding of your organization's business capabilities, processes (rules & logic), information/data, and architecture will identify organizational opportunities to create value through reduced costs or increased revenues and services.

Follow Info-Tech's methodology to enable organizational outcomes and unlock direct value.

Your approach indicates the scope of your modernization initiatives.

Build your organization's capability map by defining the organization's value stream and validating the industry reference architecture.

Use business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining the organization's key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map.

Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of business processes, information, applications, and technology support of key capabilities.

Sustain capability-based strategy planning through ongoing identification and roadmapping of capability gaps.

Industry Overview: Wholesale

The wholesale industry sells products of various types directly to business customers and retailers. Some wholesalers provide or ship the purchased goods. In addition, they sometimes deal with partners, creating a complex supply and delivery chain.

Wholesalers range from small shops to large global companies across all verticals, such as AmerisourceBergen (pharmaceuticals) and Associated Grocers (supermarkets).

Consumers can quickly and easily shift what they purchase and where they purchase from. Therefore, enterprises must understand shifting consumer patterns to manage inventory and store location.

Wholesalers purchase products from manufacturers or suppliers. They then sell products to a variety of retailers. Their value is in providing inventory for retailers at higher fulfilment speed and lower overhead than if the retailer bought directly from a supplier and warehoused the product before sale.

In August 2022, total wholesaler sales in the United States amounted to an estimated value of almost 700 billion US dollars. This represents an increase of about 100 billion US dollars year-over-year.

Business value defines the success criteria of an organization as manifested through organizational goals and outcomes, and it is interpreted from four perspectives:

• Profit generation: The revenue generated from a business capability with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
• Cost reduction: The cost reduction when performing business capabilities with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
• Service enablement: The productivity and efficiency gains of internal business operations from products and capabilities enhanced with modern technologies.
• Customer and market reach: The improved reach and insights of the business in existing or new markets.

Business Value Matrix