Starring WHSmith, Pour Moi, and Allbirds: 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 Office Depot, Co-op, Nedap, Wunderkind, VoCoVo, Iceland, Pricer, RC Visions, Shopify, Manhattan Associates, and Inventory Planner by Sage.
Allbirds
Sensormatic Solutions is working with Allbirds to boost its customer experience with radio frequency identification (RFID) enabled inventory accuracy.
The footwear brand selected Sensormatic’s inventory intelligence solution to help improve item level inventory tracking between warehouses and stores and enable future omnichannel execution.
“Our priority is our customers, ensuring they have the best possible shopping experience by meeting them where they are and how or when they want to shop. As such, we’ve continued to focus on bolstering our business with the latest technologies,” says Micah Nelson, Director of Product Management, at Allbirds.
“Our collaboration with Sensormatic Solutions and its customer and user centric applications was a natural choice for this pursuit. Operational accuracy allows us to make decisions, so we focus on what matters most: our shoppers.”
Brookshire Grocery Company
Brookshire Grocery Company (BGC) has completed implementation of Logile’s retail labour planning and workforce management (WFM) solutions at its 209 locations across five banners operating in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma in addition to corporate offices.
Distribution centres and warehouses are currently being implemented. Store execution management will commence as the final implementation phase.
Facing end-of-life concerns on its legacy WFM solution and a desire to improve flexibility, the partner (associate) experience and operational effectiveness, BGC selected Logile’s solutions to replace its existing system.
It signed with Logile for solutions spanning labour standards and modelling, forecasting, staff planning, budgeting, employee scheduling, mobile employee self-service, time and attendance, and store and task execution management.
Shopify and Manhattan Associates
Manhattan Associates and Shopify have announced a new partnership that aims to help retailers build unified omnichannel shopping experiences.
This will see Shopify’s commerce platform combined with Manhattan’s omnichannel order management solution.
“Manhattan’s focus on fast, easy, reliable and transparent shopping enables our enterprise retail customers to lower sales friction and elevate purchase confidence, which is why we’re proud to align ourselves with with Shopify in our mutual endeavour to improve the digital commerce experience,” says Brian Kinsella, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Manhattan.
“We’re excited about the elevated experience for consumers, and the increased revenue and margin potential for our merchants owing to the combined offering.”
Office Depot
Office Depot has improved in-store staff completion rates by 42% and omnichannel integration by installing Zebra Workcloud software and mobile computing solutions, which have speeded up display, assistance and other operations.
OBI
OBI, Germany's top DIY brand and a major player in home and garden retail across Europe, has selected TradeBeyond's multi-enterprise platform for an extensive supply chain digitalisation project, which will help its Asian sourcing arm.
OFFICE
Footwear retailer OFFICE and retail technology specialist Red Ant have announced a partnership that helps those shoppers waiting to see if the shoes they have chosen from the display are in stock.
Co-op
UK retailer Co-op has moved its full stack of payments and fraud prevention technology software into ACI Worldwide’s multi-tenant cloud platform hosted in Microsoft Azure.
PacSun
Nedap has partnered with PacSun to implement RFID across the company’s fleet of stores.
Deployment of iD Cloud Store to all of PacSun’s stores is estimated to be completed in Q1 2024.
It says that it is tapping the solution to increase inventory accuracy, inform replenishment decisions, and improve both omnichannel and in-store experiences.
Shirley Gao, Chief Digital and Information Officer at PacSun, says: “Meeting our Gen Z customers in how they want to shop is crucial. PacSun shoppers are social media savvy and shop our exclusive merch drops with urgency.”
“We pay attention to our customers' desired preferences and listen to them every second of every day - including their expectations of a seamless shopping experience. To achieve this, PacSun is a digital disruptor and we actively invest in technologies that will help take our brand experience to the next level.”
“Partnering with Nedap is helping us unlock competitive advantages as we tap into data rich fulfilment and operational cheat codes to get the right product to the right stores for the right customers.”
Silmäasema
Silmäasema, a Finland-based eye care specialist, has thus far rolled out 200-plus Philips Android SoC digital signage displays across 40 of its 150 stores to transform its in-store customer experience (CX).
FirstView and PPDS are the implementation partners for the on-going implementation, with the latter’s Wave cloud-based control and management platform providing central control remotely from the head office to help with coordinated marketing, promotions, messaging and so on.
Pour Moi
Size inclusive lingerie and swimwear brand, Pour Moi, has partnered with performance marketeer Wunderkind, to help further grow its first-party data collection to optimise its direct to consumer (DTC) sales channel, which already accounts for 58% of its business.
WHSmith
WHSmith has appointed GXO as its new outsourced UK logistics partner.
The retailer has over 1,100 stores across the UK in both travel and high street locations which were previously serviced from three in-house distribution centres in Swindon, Birmingham and Dunstable.
Under the new agreement, all three of these will transfer to GXO, which will operate the end-to-end supply of WHSmith’s UK retail businesses.
All 440 colleagues who work in the DCs will transfer to GXO via the TUPE process.
O&CC
Outdoor and Cycle Concepts (O&CC), the largest outdoor, running and snowsports retailer in the UK, comprising of high street brands Cotswold Outdoor, Runners Need and Snow+Rock, is expanding the £1.5 million roll-out of electronic shelf labels from Sweden’s Pricer to all its 78 stores by May.
Iceland
UK supermarket Iceland is to roll-out Series 5 voice headsets from VoCoVo to improve the ability of staff to help customers at its 1,004 stores in a quick and easy manner. Internal efficiency, safety procedures and so on will also benefit from the upgrade.
Iceland opted for the Series 5 Pro headsets after a trial and before that a vetting process. VoCoVo’s voice product best met all of its requirements for a durable, lightweight and innovative solution that could help transform the consumer and colleague working experience.
The roll-out covers all areas of Iceland’s retail stores, including the shop floor, back areas and home delivery services.
RC Visions
Remote control vehicle retailer RC Visions has chosen Inventory Planner by Sage to help cut stockouts, save time and boost revenue.
It can now benefit from forecasting along with buying recommendations that reveal exactly which inventory to order and when to order it. Inventory Planner factors in promotions, market trends and seasonality.
Based out of Huntington Beach, California, RC Visions sells a collection of remote controlled vehicles – including RC cars, RC airplanes, RC boats, Gliders and RC Trucks – as well as other hobbyist supplies.
After starting with a bricks and mortar store, the retailer has recently expanded into e-commerce with a Shopify powered store. This triggered the need for an intelligent, reliable way to forecast demand for some 12,000 SKUs across multiple locations.
After running into multiple issues with entry level forecasting tool Stocky, which resulted in the business spending hours each week fixing mistakes, RC Visions switched to Inventory Planner, which offers a native integration to Shopify.
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