Author: Nikki Baird

Nikki Baird is the vice president of strategy at Aptos, a retail enterprise solution provider. She is charged with accelerating retailers’ ability to innovate. She has been a top global retail industry influencer for several years, with a background in retail and technology. She is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and has been quoted as a retail subject matter expert in The Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Huffington Post, and National Public Radio, among many others. Nikki brings perspective from all sides of the retail technology equation: she has been an industry analyst for nearly fifteen years, co-founding Retail Systems Research, the premier boutique analyst firm focused on the retail industry. Prior to co-founding RSR, Nikki was an analyst at both Forrester Research and Retail Systems Alert Group, where she covered retail industry and technology topics. Prior to that, she was director of marketing for StorePerform, a store execution management software provider, and director of product marketing for Viewlocity, a supply chain software provider focusing on adaptive supply chain execution and exception management. Nikki came to Viewlocity from PwC Consulting, now IBM Global Services, where as a senior manager she led IT strategy consulting engagements for retail and CPG clients. Nikki has an M.B.A. from the University of Texas, Austin, focusing on operations and IT. She also holds a bachelor of arts in political science and Russian, with a minor in physics, from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

RSR Research: A Model for Delivering Sophisticated Technology to SMB

Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) – particularly the mid-sized retailers, those between $250 million and $1 billion in revenue – have long recognized the value of sophisticated tools, but the segment continues to be a difficult market to penetrate for technology providers. What do you find are some of the overall challenges of bringing retail technology to the SMB retail space?

RSR Research: Websites Behaving Badly and the Back-End Fixes They Need

“Ecommerce sites are behaving badly this holiday season – more, actually, than I expected to see.” says BrainTrust Panelist Nikki Baird. “Somehow I thought the industry was well past “eCommerce 101″, but that’s not the case.” What basic “eCommerce 101” failures are you still seeing out there? What basic areas do you think need the most improvement?

RSR Research: Getting Store Buy-in for Workforce Optimization – Lessons Learned

Last week at KronosWorks, several Kronos for Retail customers presented on their implementations of workforce management. Most focused on implementing forecasting and scheduling, and several common themes emerged among the speakers. What do you think are some core strategies for improving store implementation of workforce management? What steps should be taken to ensure strong cooperation from store managers as well as the store staff?

RSR Research: Pricing Merchants Right

There’s a business axiom that has been around so long, it’s almost cliche: You get what you measure. And while Retail Paradox recently explored how same-store sales have become an inadequate measure of retail performance in light of the rise of multi-channel synergies, retailers may also have to redefine how they measure their people as well. Do you think how merchants are measured should be redefined in light of activities such as pricing optimization, merchandise localization and cross-channel shopping?

BrainTrust Query: How important is buy online/pick up in-store as a strategy for retail growth?

Giving consumers a choice to buy online and pick up in-store is becoming a major point of competitive differentiation in the retail industry. Or is it? Well-known pioneers Circuit City, CompUSA, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Sears – and even smaller multi-channel players like Bombay Co. – are providing in-store pick-up for web orders as part of an overall strategy to improve customer service and increase profitable growth. How much emphasis should retailers be placing on a buy online/pick up in-store program?