The Minds Behind Neiman Marcus' Digital Merchandising

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

May 2015 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

How an iconic retailer’s innovation lab vets the popular yet pragmatic customer-facing technology it ultimately deploys to stores.

Scott Emmons has been a busy guy. For nearly 10 years, he’s been working tirelessly on many of the high profile and innovative store-level, customer-facing IT projects that have kept Neiman Marcus in the customer experience spotlight. You know — an iOS device in every associate’s hands, the Memomi Memory Mirror, the T1Visions touch table look books — the stuff that makes analysts and press people swoon at NRF every year.

But first came the plumbing. Over a three-year period as project lead, Emmons led the company’s conversion to the Business Objects XI Platform, developed a suite of custom business intelligence tools to enable the company’s access to and usage of its customer, inventory, and other enterprise data, and he oversaw the comprehensive migration of the company’s disparate data assets to the Netezza data warehouse. His work earned him a lot of accolades — most notably, the iconic luxury specialty retailer’s highest honor, the NMG Best award in 2011. Emmons was promoted to Enterprise Architect, a position that gave him the opportunity to ensure the value of his nuts-and-bolts BI (business intelligence) work was being exploited at the operations level.