Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

With a $450 million three-year plan. Nordstrom is pushing to truly achieve a single view of all inventory across all of their channels, said Jamie Nordstrom, the company’s executive vice president.

The high-end retailer is in the middle of the second year of its three-year project, with the goal of full integration of customer and product data across Web, store and catalog channels, according to an Internet Retailer story. “It’s useful internally to manage inventory, but it also gives inventory visibility to our customers as well as our salespeople on the floor,” Nordstrom said, according to the story.

The system now enables store associates at the point-of-sale counter to special order products from online inventory. As the project continues, Nordstrom will extend access to integrated inventory records to front-line employees and customers so that a store associate can view on a computer screen real-time updates of available inventory across all channels and online customers can view real-time updates of inventory available in stores. The latter will support Nordstrom’s plan to offer in-store pick-up of online orders. Nordstrom’s goal for the web channel is sales of $1 billion a year within the next four to six years.