Key Strategies for Thriving in Retail Tech Leadership with Karen Beebe

Jay Topper: [00:00:00] The world of commerce is undergoing a revolution. Today's consumer expects a buying experience that is nothing short of perfection. Your company's digital IQ has quickly become a new standard that drives growth and loyalty. Welcome to Chiefly Digital: The Digital Leader's Guide to Modern Commerce.

Welcome to this edition of Chiefly Digital. Today, I have the pleasure of having Mike Micucci, the CEO of fabric with me, Chiefly Digital Sponsor, and my boss, Mike Micucci. Welcome to Chiefly Digital. 

Mike Micucci: Oh, wow, Jay. Thanks for that great intro. How fun is that? 

Jay Topper: It's pretty fun. Uh, and we're going to talk about a few things, uh, today.

Uh, one of the first things I want to talk about is we're getting ready to go through some repositioning as a company that you're leading us through. Can you give me a few sentences of what that's about and why we're doing it and what the [00:01:00] impact, uh, to our organization is going to be and has been? 

Mike Micucci: Yeah, we, uh, I've been, let's see, I've been at fabric for about 15 months now. And it's been absolutely a delight. It's been great to catch up with all my former colleagues in the market, see what all the companies are doing, the innovation, seeing the impact of AI. But we think there's a real seismic shift going on in commerce. It was exponentially accelerated during, um, what we all call COVID, the COVID era.

And that entire piece is how companies like fabric provide the technology backbone for Brands and retailers to deliver on the promise of unified commerce, which is how they can connect all the endpoints from their demand channels, their fulfillment together without this kind of heavy spaghetti of like patchwork of systems that cost a ton of money, don't give them the visibility that they need to operate and thrive.

[00:02:00] And at fabric, we have developed some great, great products that really help in this area. So this is a big focus for us. It's what we've been working on. It's really since I've been here, and we're excited to unveil this to everybody. 

Jay Topper: Yeah, and I'm excited about it too, having been part of the journey. And when I think of the order, you've known from the first time you met me that the order is, is, is a passion of mine as well.

It's where the brand and the consumer You know, create that formal relationship, uh, of, of a purchase and putting credit card information in and receiving a product and then having, or service, and then having this lifelong relationship. So, as we position more, a little bit narrower than the way we have been, what exactly is order of service orchestration? Why are we focusing on it and why is it important to a retailer? 

Mike Micucci: Well, I always like to say as a consumer, and I think all of us can relate to this is, you know, [00:03:00] commerce does not stop after checkout, right? It's only getting started. And if you have a bad experience as a customer, um, where you've placed an order and It either you don't have a lot of transparency, you have to make a change, there's some disruption, it gets split, cancelled, um, you put the wrong address in, all the million things that seem to happen.

It just reflects poorly on the brand. In today's world, there's so many alternatives. Orchestrating that journey through the ever kind of, uh, increasing complexity of where I can place the order from to where it might get fulfilled, from a locker to my doorstep, to pick it up at a store, to send it to my hotel.

That journey gets more and more complex. And orchestrating that journey is more and more important. And it's not just, yeah, I can get it from point A to point B, but can I do it cost effectively, right? Where I [00:04:00] don't blow my margin out of the water because I, uh, I had to over index on things. And again, this is orchestration.

I view is that, that managing that flow, um, effectively both operationally so that you can deliver on the costs that you need to do as well as, um, deliver the customer experience, no matter where they show up, that's a hallmark of a great company. And that's where we see our customers thriving. 

Jay Topper: Yeah, I really like that. I like the complexities, uh, upstream of the order, all the marketing channels that are becoming selling channels, all the selling channels, and then the fulfillment and distribution, as you mentioned, the customer service, the order tracking, all the modes of delivery. There's so much on either side of that.

Having this engine in the middle, I think is, is super cool. When we go through repositioning, uh, you know, one of the sort of above order orchestration is what the product is, which is OrderCloud, [00:05:00] which I also love. Why OrderCloud? Why are we heading down a rename of our platform as OrderCloud? 

Mike Micucci: Well, I think traditionally when you talk about orchestration, which is, you know, it's a great holiday dinnertime discussion is, let's talk about what orchestration, um, you really talk about OMS, right, which is that thing in the back end that does traditionally orchestration was often handled in your ERP system, um, And some combination of maybe you had a legacy order system.

And they were designed mostly for control, right? Financial control, not in today's world of digital. Um, where you have many, many different channels that you have to service, both in fulfillment and demand. There's a principle in kind of the tech world, sometimes you've heard, maybe you've heard of a J, it was called shift left.

And the idea of shift left is, um, Typically with technology, you can go upstream and kind of [00:06:00] learn more about what's happening upstream. And in the world of order orchestration and OMS, We essentially at fabric have shifted left, meaning we want to make that order demand aware. Like the idea is we can pull signals because of the way our platform works from the different channels.

We can look at PDP views, PLP, search results. We can look at that real time to help influence how you manage that demand and that order life cycle. Now same can go for the product. So this is not yesterday's order management system. This is essentially a cloud that takes in signals from demand, takes in signals from fulfillment, and helps you orchestrate in real time to deliver superior customer experiences, but also results.

So, uh, Oracle Cloud is just a bigger umbrella to encompass the world that we're in. Yesterday was about OMS, it was about control, financial control. Today is about servicing all these channels and doing it with the most [00:07:00] impact to your customers, but also, you know, giving back to the bottom line of your company.

Jay Topper: Yeah, I really like that. And as a, as a lifelong, well, 27 or 28 year CIO and CTO, The fact of the matter is it's also built on really great modular technology. So when it comes to extensibility, scalability, flexibility, all those are just inherent to the product suite as well, which is, uh, which are great features.

Another area, and I've on a few of the podcasts, in fact, several when, when people have brought up AI and everybody talks about personalization and, and customer service, but there's this whole Whole focus now and maybe even not enough focus, but certainly ours on operations excellence, giving a lot of power to the end users to continually enhance and improve that customer experience.

So, if you summarize our AI focus in and around order orchestration and order cloud, how would you describe that? 

Mike Micucci: You know, it's [00:08:00] interesting. Uh, we are definitely in this new era of AI, and it is changing the entire landscape of all enterprise applications. Um, and the applications that we have and are know today will not be the same in the future.

in a couple years. We're in that kind of shift and it's accelerating. A lot of the, the pieces you talked about is AI is going to transform the shopping experience. We've seen shopping agents. I really love what Perplexity is doing. But if you think about that impact on a commerce system and or a management system is you now have even more different avenues of demand and different explorations coming at you.

And a system like fabric needs to be able to mold itself to those different signals and respond in virtual real time. Now, if you think about AI on operational excellence, what can it do? It's essentially your [00:09:00] guide and we use AI to guide the operators through how to configure their system, how to respond to events.

So let's compare and contrast to the old world. The old world, the way you would manage your typical order system is you would look at a BI system in one screen, look at your dashboards, um, maybe see some alerts, maybe you get a phone call from your operations, like why are you rejecting all the shipments, I don't have the inventory, I'm out of sync.

Then you go into your, your, Systems, your commerce systems, your management systems, you start changing the fields and you probably can't even just change it. You need a programmer to help you change the rules and you go through a back and forth and it takes a long time. It's really expensive. I had one customer tell me every rule change is 100 of programming time.

And so by the time you get all this done, the issue is probably six weeks in the past and you're, you're, you know, already kind of [00:10:00] missed the boat. AI Changes that it collapses the whole cycle this is what we put AI at the center of order cloud and we give it allow the operators to be guided so they have the data all the data is there they have the day at their fingertips it's proactively alerting you you can go back and forth on questions like why is my um my split shipment so high or what's happening over here and then it can guide you to what changes you have to make our entire principle of fabric was it was configurable it's not code Like we shouldn't need to go to a programmer to make the basic system settings that operate your business.

So AI is essentially not only it guides the operators of how to use the system, but it's their partner in helping them understand what the most impactful changes are. And then we'll start to automate those changes. so that, um, it'll actually start to do that for you with your approval and with guidance on why it's [00:11:00] doing it.

This is a very exciting landscape. It brings the kind of controls and capabilities right to the operator's, uh, fingertips versus having to, like, go back and forth between a BI system, a different system, and a programmer. Um, we're going to make that go away. 

Jay Topper: No, I think that's really exciting. And again, you know, putting my CIO, CTO hat on, You know, giving power to the end users.

I know when I implemented fabric before we had AI capabilities, uh, off of a legacy ATG system at Chico's, the operators said they went from the worst experience they ever had to the best. And I can't imagine bringing in some of the, the analytics right inside of there and then predicting and recommending what to do within your console to improve those analytics.

Incredibly powerful. I think it's in a place that maybe doesn't have quite as much focus, uh, on in the market, but certainly one that's going to have impact in retail, and it's great to be at the front edge of [00:12:00] that. So, we have NRF coming up, and I know we're all excited about that, and we're in tons of meetings, and we have lots of going on, so.

You know, what would you tell the customers, prospects, partners that are coming to NRF and you know, what, how are our activities? How can they best engage with us? What would you tell anybody listening about our sort of, you know, relaunch of ourselves uh, just right before NRF? 

Mike Micucci: Yeah, well, outside we always have the best parties at NRF, um, fabric always, always throws a good event, partly because you're there, Jay.

Everybody wants to hang out with Jay. I don't know about that, but. Well, look, I'm, I'm at heart a product person. We save our best tech and we built towards, you know, showing off our newest and greatest stuff at NRF. So, if you want to see what the future looks like. Particularly around commerce and, you know, what we call, uh, the next generation [00:13:00] or reimagined OMS, you should come and check out our product and how we're using AI to guide 10x better results.

Let's give control back to the operators, let's give you the visibility into your business, let's give you, um, a set of capabilities that help you run your business in today's environment where CapEx is very tight. Um, you need to lower your tech costs. You need to continually deliver a superior customer experience.

And that's what we built this for. Um, NRF is where we get to show it off. And, you know, it's awesome that we can do it face to face. It's hard to get time with people and everybody's there. So, uh, we're there and we've been preparing for months. Um, To show this off. 

Jay Topper: Can't wait. And we'll have a nice presence at the AWS booth as well. That's right. We have a few events there. We have our party Sunday night. And we have a bunch of employees descending upon New York City. I think it's going to be incredibly [00:14:00] exciting. I missed last year. I wasn't with fabric yet, but I'm really excited. It'll 

Mike Micucci: be good. It'll be a good time. 

Jay Topper: Can't wait to 

Mike Micucci: see 

Jay Topper: you there.

It will be a good time. Thank you. One last question, Mike. So how did your role at HP as a manager in 1990 to 1996 prepare you for this podcast? 

Mike Micucci: Well, there's a thing at HP called the HP way. I'm not sure if it's still active, but it was created by their founders. An HP way is there was a certain way of doing it, and it kind of leads into learn by doing.

It's like you need to really walk in the steps of your customers and deliver, you know, superior value. Um, I think that has been, um, basically a cornerstone of my philosophy in building products and companies is that you need to deliver superior value to your customers. And my interpretation HP way was, you know, there was a way to do the right thing and [00:15:00] deliver for your customers.

You're only here because your customers have said it's okay to be here. And, um, that's, that's a key aspect to our principle here. And how we show up. I'm very proud of what we built at fabric. I just look at our holiday results and, um, you know, the system stability and performance is through the ceiling, um, and, uh, you know, we hope to continue that tradition.

And I think this was shaped for me early in my career. I was very fortunate to be able to both intern at HP, And their internship program that worked there in the, we'll call it the formative years. 

Jay Topper: No, and I, I mean, uh, and we didn't have five or six nines over the holiday. We had a hundred percent uptime, which is really cool.

And of course, as a former customer of fabric, that, that empathy. Uh, and that focus on the customer shined brightly, and, and, and, and why I'm here at fabric now is because I know how we treat customers, and that's really cool. So, well, thanks for joining, Mike. I [00:16:00] appreciate it, uh, and I'll see you at some meeting really soon. 

Mike Micucci: All right, Jay. Thank you. Have a great afternoon. 

Jay Topper: Thank you for joining this edition of Chiefly Digital. It was so fun having my boss, Mike Micucci, on. One thing I love about fabric amongst many is that, uh, almost all of my podcasts are, are thought leadership ones that don't really promote or push any specific platform, including fabrics. But I have such a passion for fabric. You can hear Mike's passion, uh, not only on, on the capabilities, the, the current, uh, order orchestration platform, the order cloud platform has, but the future in AI.

We're big believers in this is going to make a wonderful difference in a whole new generation for OMS. Very excited, very excited about NRF. You can watch Chiefly Digital as always on YouTube, or you can download it and listen on Spotify or Apple. Thank you again for joining Chiefly [00:17:00] Digital.