Featuring Simbe, Volumental, and Proximity: RTIH presents last week’s biggest retail technology plays at a glance
RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, launches, deployments and pilots from the past seven days. Including Wakefern Food Corp., Au Vodka, Walmart, Amazon, Albert Heijn, and Heineken.
Wakefern
Wakefern Food Corp. is expanding Simbe Robotics’ business intelligence solution to additional ShopRite stores after a pilot.
Over the past several months, Wakefern vetted Simbe’s platform in more than 20 stores.
It first began integrating the solution, powered by Tally, to drive inventory optimisation at the stores and help retail associates do more impactful, customer facing work.
Tally is a robot that autonomously scans shelves of products using AI to identify out-of-stock, misplaced, or mispriced products, as well as generate product location data for efficient inventory replenishment.
Simbe then delivers real-time actionable insights to drive improved store operations.
Outdoor and Cycle Concepts
Volumental has announced a partnership with Outdoor and Cycle Concepts (O&CC), a UK outdoor and sports retailer, following a pilot phase where its foot scanners reduced product returns by 28%.
The Anthony Nicholas Group
The Anthony Nicholas Group (ANG) has chosen Proximity to deliver a clienteling solution, with the aim of strengthening and transforming customer engagement for its brands Fraser Hart and Fields the Jewellers.
Au Vodka
British brand Au Vodka has partnered with e-commerce fulfilment firm Huboo as it looks to meet online demand and accelerate its global journey which began in 2015 when it was founded by friends Jackson Quinn and Charlie Morgan.
The business has since reported £40 million in annual sales, a launch into Europe, and an upcoming venture into the US.
A large number of Au Vodka’s products are sold and delivered directly thanks to Huboo, which delivers nearly 2.5 million items a month for more than 1,500 businesses, from startups such as Au Vodka to multinational giants like Nestlé and Porsche.
It picks, packs and ships to one in five UK households today and stores a further 18 million items across over 700,000 sq. ft of global warehouse space, with its software able to integrate with e-commerce channels and marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, TikTok and Shopify.
Henderson Technology
EPoS software system provider, Henderson Technology, in partnership with Blu Dot Technologies, has launched a new mobile pay at pump app called Fuel Pay.
On arrival, motorists can use this to select the pump, fuel grade and the amount to refuel.
The pump is authorised in-store and then refuelling can begin. Payment automatically uses the card assigned during initial registration. On completion the customer drives away, with their VAT receipt e-mailed automatically.
Walmart
Walmart reports that it has surpassed 10,000 safe drone deliveries and is revealing the most popular item delivered in this way – the Oreo Family Size Pack.
In celebration of the milestone, the US retail giant has teamed up with Oreo to create a two foot version of the well known cookie and film what is pitched as “one of the most epic Oreo dunks ever witnessed”.
We’ll let you make you own mind about that.
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Scribbler
Scribbler and Fujifilm UK have continued their partnership to create the Scribbler Lite, offering customers at stores instant access to over 2,000 greeting cards, in a wall mounted or countertop display option.
Designed for use through a touch screen display, people will be able to find the perfect card for any occasion, as well as write their personal message inside in any font, size, or colour, of their choice.
Once complete, the product is printed behind the till using the FUJIFILM CX3240 creative duplex printer and is ready for collection in 60 seconds.
The software gives retailers, as well as commercial premises, the chance to carry an extensive range of greeting cards without running the risk of waste due to overstock or requiring the footprint of a photo kiosk.
This is being pitched as a particular benefit during seasons such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, where stock can become outdated and leftover stock goes to waste.
Reitan Convenience Sweden
Reitan Convenience Sweden (RCS), a company operating within the convenience store industry in Sweden with over 400 stores, has announced the expansion of its partnership with unified supply chain and retail planning solution provider RELEX Solutions.
RCS is well known for its Pressbyrån and 7-Eleven brands, which currently use RELEX to evaluate and optimise promotional campaigns.
The company has decided to expand its use of the solution, establishing a single integrated tool to improve promotion forecasting, reduce manual tasks, and increase the profitability of promotions.
Previously, RCS relied on legacy systems and spreadsheets to manage its promotion planning. However, parts of the process were manual and time consuming.
After a vendor selection process, it chose RELEX because of the team’s professionalism, industry knowledge and insights, and reputation for promotion planning optimisation.
Heart with Smart Group
UK hospitality company, Heart with Smart Group, has selected Vista to provide technology support and project services for its estate of 150+ Pizza Hut restaurants across the UK, and its growing portfolio of itsu stores.
Heart with Smart operates both its Pizza Hut ‘dine-in’ restaurants and itsu quick service restaurants (QSRs), seven days a week.
With trading hours from lunch until late at night, its team were looking for an agile technology partner that could deliver excellent levels of service to maximise the uptime of its business critical in-restaurant technology, including EPoS/Point of Service systems at the front of house, kitchen management systems, and back office IT.
The multi-year contract award includes the provision of on-site field hardware maintenance for all of Heart with Smart’s restaurant locations, as well as Vista’s Repair Centre, for the refurbishment, repair and redeployment of IT systems.
Heart with Smart also intends to tap into Vista’s Restaurant IT Project Services and IMAC Services, which includes working with the firm to deliver its digital transformation roadmap managing the deployment of new technology, as well as provide an IT project office for managing new store openings and store refits.
Albert Heijn and Heineken
Sook and Mall of Africa
Sook, which takes vacant retail spaces and gives them a modular, digital fit-out which can be rented by the hour, has announced a partnership with Mall of Africa (MoA).
This opens the doors for brands to lease UK-based Sook’s rentable space within the MoA’s complex in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The move represents the company's debut into international markets and its first design, commercial, technology assets and business model license agreement.
The lease is secured for a minimum of five years, during which Sook has committed to providing ongoing assistance in revenue generation and technical support.
Wichita State University
Wichita State Dining has announced the roll-out of robotic food delivery on campus, thanks to a partnership with Starship Technologies.
The latter’s fleet of autonomous, on-demand robots are now available to deliver food from the following campus restaurants: RSC Starbucks; Panda Express; Freddy’s Frozen Custard; Tu Taco; Market at Groundhouse; Cargill Cafe; Black & Gold Grill: A Delivery Ghost Kitchen.
The service works in conjunction with the student meal plan and Shocker dollars, as well as via credit card.
Users can download the Starship Deliveries app on their mobile device and get food delivered for a $2.49 fee to any campus location. They then drop a pin where they want their delivery to be sent.
They can watch as the robot makes its journey to them, via an interactive map. Once the robot arrives, they receive an alert, and can then meet and unlock it through the app.
The delivery usually takes just a matter of minutes, depending on the menu items ordered and the distance the robot must travel. Each robot can carry the equivalent of about three shopping bags of goods.
Amazon
Amazon is leveraging generative AI to help people better understand what customers are saying about a product, without having to read through lots of individual reviews.
In an online post, Vaughn Schermerhorn, Director, Community Shopping at Amazon, says: “Last year alone, 125 million customers contributed nearly 1.5 billion reviews and ratings to Amazon stores - that’s 45 reviews every second, making reviews at Amazon an incredible resource for customers.”
“We want to make it even easier for customers to understand the common themes across reviews, and with the recent advancements in generative AI, we believe we have the technical means to address this long standing customer need.”
“Want to quickly determine what other customers are saying about a product before reading through the reviews?”
“Our new AI powered feature provides a short paragraph right on the product detail page that highlights the product features and customer sentiment frequently mentioned across written reviews to help customers determine at a glance whether a product is right for them.”
Central Retail Corporation
Thailand’s Central Retail Corporation (CRC) has partnered with Ant Group to launch Alipay+ at its stores.
Users can make payments via their local digital wallet, including Alipay (Chinese mainland), AlipayHK (Hong Kong SAR), Touch ‘n Go eWallet (Malaysia) and Kakao Pay (South Korea).
Payments can be made across over 3,000 stores nationwide under the CRC banner, including Central and Robinson Deportment Stores, Supersports, Tops, Power Buy, B2S, OfficeMate, Matsukiyo, Tops Vita and Muji.
AllPondSolutions and AllPetSolutions
AllPondSolutions and its sister brand AllPetSolutions have deployed Inventory Planner by Sage technology.
This gives them access to a demand forecasting app which reveals exactly which inventory to order and when, based on an accurate calculation of how much a merchant will sell which factors in supplier timescales, seasonality and promotions, alongside historical sales data.
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