ECOMMERCE & MARKETPLACE OPERATIONS

As technology partners to the Online division of the parent company, this division is at the forefront of providing application framework and infrastructure to power ecommerce & mobility solutions that provide Transformco members a rewarding and seamless multi-channel shopping experience. Whether members shop from their desktops, tablets, and mobile devices or use Transformco’s Android/iOS native applications, they will see an easy-to-use, fast, and engaging user interface. The division has enabled several cutting-edge fulfillment flows in the omni-channel retail industry to help customers get a large assortment of products in a cost-effective and timely manner. The Business Operations support teams continuously strive to streamline operational processes and provide round-the-clock monitoring support to ensure high availability of applications and services. The Marketplace & Business Operations teams provide critical business operations, finance & accounting support, which are core to business.

HOME SERVICES

The Home Services division delivers state-of-the-art technology solutions on 40+ B2B/B2C platforms and serves over 4 million homes per year (~850,000 5-star ratings on average). These platforms enable a broad range of retail-related residential and commercial services – from home improvement, home cleaning, home appliance purchase, warranty, and repair – across all 50 states of the US, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. The division constantly endeavors to make the platform and application robust, flexible, and scalable for a better customer experience. The entire system is enhanced, maintained, and supported by over 150 highly experienced IT professionals, who are looking to introduce more automation to enhance efficiency and customer experience through better UI/UX. The division is also working on automating their testing and release management to achieve application modernization, reduce technical debts by moving towards more manageable code, and increasingly leverage AWS services.

ANALYTICS

The Analytics division at Sears is comprised of a number of teams that work together to assess product performance, generate deep insights, and enhance customer experience. The Online Analytics team leverages machine learning to deliver data-driven solutions for driving digital marketing, supporting ~90 million site visits a year and ~4 billion emails sent to customers. The Member Services Organization Technology team is responsible for delivering best-in-class customer experience in chat, SMS, and IVR channels supported by a strong business intelligence platform enabled by MicroStrategy and Tableau to facilitate better insights into member pain points and MSO agents’ Performance management. The Central Analytics team caters to a wide range of internal business units in providing high quality data engineering, analytics, and reporting services using smart BI tools such as Tableau and MicroStrategy. It has built hundreds of dashboards so far for business units, such as Transformco’s loyalty platform Shop Your Way, Asset Profit Protection, Finance, Online, Auto and Inventory management. The Enterprise Data Library team is responsible for consolidating organizational data across a number of areas, from sellable units and inventory to retail events. Since the Teradata shutdown in 2020, the team is enabling strategic decisions for revenue growth, targeting valuable customers and for running important campaigns and offers.

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

The Inventory Management division takes care of end-to-end replenishment for Kmart and Sears stores across the US. It is responsible for ordering, demand planning, and maintaining optimum stock levels at all times. The Item Setup team is responsible for setting up items while the Global Sourcing team ensures that the orders are processed on time for timely delivery. The Buying team will liaise with suppliers to negotiate and secure value for money on a full range of goods and services, and build effective stakeholder relationships, ensuring a high service level in terms of quotations, quality compliance, and lead times. The Analytics team works on analyzing the sales trend data and root causes for low stock levels in stores, which enables crucial business decisions. Moreover, there is a dedicated Robotic Process Automation team that works on simplifying the processes for optimum productivity.

SUPPLY CHAIN AND LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT

The Supply Chain & Logistics Management division is responsible for managing a broad range of applications for Inventory Management, Assortment & Allocation, Transportation & Logistics, and Demand Forecasting Services. It continues to improve application performance across the SCM lifecycle and, thus, enhance member experience through a mix of latest and traditional technology, from Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to a strong footprint of ‘Big Data’ technologies including Hadoop, Python, GCP, and Airflow.

WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT

The Warehouse Management division offers a wide range of technology solutions in diversified areas for B2B and B2C platforms. These solutions a) Enable warehouses to process vendor shipments, fulfil orders, and transfer items to other warehouses; b) Integrate legacy and new age ordering and fulfilment systems within the organization and third party partners; c) Provide supply chain business with a single access point in the form of user interface portal for order management and tracking; d) Enable home delivery business to update item prices via user interface portal.

MARKETING, PRICING, & SIGNAGE

The Marketing, Pricing, and Signage division provides technology solutions that enable creation, planning, and management of multi-channel promotional offers supported by optimized, accurate, and consistent prices derived from advanced algorithms and transmission of these offers to stores in digital and paper format signage to increase brand value, enhance perceived value, create interest, and engage members. The group serves delivery of data to Kmart.com, Sears.com, and Kmart, Full-Line and Hometown format of physical stores.
The Item/Vendor Management Services division responsible for the Product Master, enhances, maintains, and supports over 20 applications for managing items and vendors for Sears/Kmart stores and online business. This covers a wide range of services/applications including item build/manage platform, online content handling, asset management, integration services, vendor relation management services (including onboarding and legal aspects of the vendor associations) along with the various other B2B services.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Financial Services products are centered largely on payment processing for Sears, Kmart, Home Services, and Online channels. Real-time payment authorization, refund management, settlement, and reconciliation are some of core functionalities offered by these products. The authorization system processes real-time payment requests for Credit, Debit, and Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT), Sears Gift Cards, third-party Gift Cards, and associate discounts. Other important solutions include Sears Rapid Credit, layaway, lease applications, account number lookup, ID validation, and long term storing of customer receipts in a secure way. While some of the products are vendor managed solutions, others are custom built using open source technologies, cloud-based services and mainframe platform. The division continuously engineers these systems to keep them secure, robust, and pertinent to changing business needs.

FINANCE AND REAL ESTATE

Financial systems serve the core financial functions and reporting for Transformco. These functions include Accounts Payables, Accounts Receivables, Retail Accounting and Financial Inventory, Procurement, Treasury, Tax Applications, and Financial Reporting. Real Estate Applications are responsible for the management of owned and leased properties and the maintenance of facilities. The Executive Information System (EIS) – which has over 30 applications – helps the executives to model, analyze, and interpret complex business scenarios, and also provides various insights to the business data.

PAYROLL, WORKFORCE ADMINISTRATION, AND HR

As a technology partner to Transformco, the division provides HR process automation solutions for Payroll and Benefits processing. There are fully automated business calendar-based workflows across Timekeeping systems, ADP (Automatic Data Processing Inc), banks, benefit providers, and compliance vendors to enable secure, efficient, and accurate processing of payroll, benefits, and reporting. A cloud-based data pipeline across various tools enables Associates Master Data Management, Employee Self-Service, Workforce Analytics, Variable Pay System, and Talent Management System. Several custom-built solutions such as Case Management, Garnishment Processing, and Transaction Processing Center run on industry best practices. The division is continuously adapting cloud-based services and new products to reflect the need of business partners in the ever-evolving HR domain.

E-LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

The Segno suite of applications provides various platforms for e-learning and performance management of associates. This gamified learning platform not only allows for publishing of various types of e-learning courses, but also provides flexibility to organize instructor-led training courses. A goal-setting framework enables the leaders to define their business priorities and individuals to record their objectives and measure their results. Our personalized performance management tool leverages data visualization techniques to facilitate performance metric tracking for associates, technicians, agents, and managers. Business partners can drive various reward and recognition programs for the field associates while they progress in their individual KPI-based goals. Our coaching tool gives a platform for mangers to provide feedback on various topics and conduct coaching programs through close engagement of the associates and coaches. Various dashboards in the suite give insights to these programs. These tools are largely built on open source technologies and cloud-based services. The division continuously leverages these technologies to add new functions to serve broader goals of the business.

TECHNOLOGY ENABLEMENT

The Technology Enablement division is responsible for providing infrastructure support services for multiple areas ranging from database management, data integration and desktop, servers & network management to critical production support and business process management. The division continues to work on improving the features, performance, infrastructure, and process efficiency to deliver best member experiences.

TELECOM EXPENSE MANAGEMENT

The Telecom Expense Management division is responsible for managing all telecom expense related services (invoice management, call accounting, asset management, reporting services, vendor set-up, account set-up, product set-up, cost center set-up, GL code set-up, and dispute management) for Transformco. The division provides services for all Telecom services types, which include local, conferencing, toll free, VOIP, data services, long distance, managed services, broadband, and wireless services. The team reviews all invoices to ensure they are accurately processed and the payments are made to the vendors on time. The team is also required to determine and disconnect services that are no longer required to ensure the company is not paying for services which are not being utilized, thereby saving costs.