Bangkok, Thailand – 17 August 2020: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that The Mall Group has adopted the IBM Cloud Pak for Data System, an all-in-one cloud-native data and AI platform in a box, to better understand and adapt to the rapidly changing purchasing habits of its extensive customer base. The solution will be used across the The Mall, The Emporium, The Emquartier, Paragon Department Store and Bluport Hua Hin Resort Mall.

COVID-19 has changed consumer behavior leading to the now-normal lifestyle. Take for example, many customers today prefer to shop from the comfort of their home and prefer to leverage The Mall’s M Chat & Shop service to order their favorite products from chat application. This way the items are delivered directly to their homes. As a forward-thinking organization, the Mall Group decided to leverage advanced analytics in their marketing strategy planning to support their need to better understanding the complex customer behavior.

The IBM Cloud Pak for Data System is a preconfigured, governed and secure environment that enables organizations to quickly collect, organize and analyze data. This hyper-converged system is built on Red Hat OpenShift and provides quick access to a broad set of data and AI services. The Mall Group will use the solution to better understand the changing behaviors and trends of consumers and derive real-time insights from its extensive shopping databases, which include its M Card (over 4M customers) and its SCB M VISA program (over 600,000 customers). This is also the first use of Netezza Performance Server powered by IBM Cloud Pak for Data platform in Asia Pacific.

Voralak Tulaphorn, Chief Marketing Officer of The Mall Group Co., Ltd. said, “The Mall Group is entering its 4^th decade by embracing technologies to build the new shopping experience for it’s customers and laying down strategies to transform the company to become an Omni Channel Retailer. We are leveraging digital transformation as a step forward in augmenting the highest number of selling channels, from offline to online, to achieve the maximum customer satisfaction and enable seamless shopping experience.”

Elaborating further, she said, “This investment is aligned with our “new beginning – new smile” vision in building the new model for retail business world and the shopping mall of the future that bring happiness to everyone. The integrated and seamless customer experiences require integrated operations with a single-view and real-time insights - IBM Cloud Pak for Data System brings these capabilities to us, making us the first retail chain in Thailand to adopt AI.”

The Mall Group, will now have the ability to work seamlessly across platforms be it on-premises or on cloud environments, and build limitless anywhere anytime shopping experience for their customers across their stores, online at home or via their smartphones.

Jirayoot Karnjanamayoon. Chief Information Officer of The Mall Group Co., Ltd., added that “Cloud Pak for Data System comes with built-in IBM Watson® Studio and AutoAI capabilities that allow data scientists of The Mall Group to extract insights from data with the appropriate algorithm and parameters, without explicit programming. Retail is at a tipping point and businesses and department stores are shifting their focus from the store to the customer backed by data driven insights rather than the traditional marketing segmentation. The adoption of IBM Analytics and AI is expected significantly improve speed of the data analytics capacity of The Mall Group, by 60 times.”

Patama Chantaruck, Vice President for Indochina Expansion and Managing Director of IBM Thailand, added that “simply opening doors to shoppers will no longer be enough in the post-Covid world. IBM hopes that its Cloud Pak for Data System platform, which combines the power of AI, machine learning and advanced analytics, will today be an important game changer for The Mall Group. IBM is pleased to have an opportunity to support The Mall Group in its journey in building the department stores of the future and transforming the retail world in Thailand.

The Mall Group has a long-standing relationship with IBM and is leveraging IBM technologies to build shopping experience for its customers. In a recent collaboration, they used API (Application Programming Interface) technology to enable real-time point redemption experience for its M Card customers. The Mall Group’s adoption of advanced analytics and AI technology today is a step forward in its preparedness to provide a full-scale omni-channel shopping experience in the near future.

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Media contact

Paranee Reymondon  
Communications Leader, Thailand
+66 81 772 3377 Mobile
paranee@th.ibm.com  

IBM