Including The Home Depot and Landmark Group: 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 Google Cloud, Polytag, Love’s Travel Stops, Grupo Merza, CADS, PLUS Retail, MediaMarktSaturn, and RELEX Solutions.
The Home Depot
Google Cloud and The Home Depot have announced an extension of their multi-year relationship that aims to help the home improvement retailer accelerate its technology strategy and let customers complete their home improvement projects more efficiently and affordably.
The pair have collaborated since 2015, looking to improve The Home Depot's associate and customer experience no matter where shoppers are, whether that's in-store, online, or most often, a blend of those interactions.
"As one of the first major retailers to migrate our website to the cloud, Google has been a critical partner as we have built an interconnected shopping experience for our customers," says Fahim Siddiqui, EVP and CIO at The Home Depot.
"Our technology team looks forward to continuing to work closely with Google to remove friction for our customers when they shop with us and to stay on the cutting edge of retail technology."
The extended partnership involves The Home Depot accessing Google Cloud's AI capabilities to enhance the customer experience and optimise operations.
This includes leveraging technologies like machine learning, computer vision, and generative AI to enhance the retailer's inventory management operations and improve its overall supply chain efficiency.
In addition, the business will tap into future e-commerce enhancements to enable greater digital scalability.
MediaMarktSaturn
RELEX Solutions and MediaMarkt Saturn Retail Group (MediaMarktSaturn) have announced an extension to their collaboration.
Since 2017, RELEX has provided MediaMarktSaturn with forecasting, replenishment, and allocation solutions for its around 1,000 stores and 11 distribution centres across Europe.
In early 2022, the RELEX space and assortment planning solutions were added to provide a unified approach to store planning and space optimisation based on consumer demand.
MediaMarktSaturn is now expanding its use of RELEX tech to include advanced planning and analysis capabilities.
This will help it digitalise sales and operations planning, optimise inventory replenishment within sales and inventory targets, and provide planners with advanced insights to diagnose and explain supply chain issues.
DDRS Alliance and Polytag
Not-for-profit company, DDRS Alliance, whose members include Circularity Solutions, Recycl3r, ACE UK, Tetra Pak and Valpak - and recycling tech firm, Polytag, have announced a collaboration to accelerate the development and adoption of Digital DRS in the UK.
As the launch date for a DRS in the UK is reportedly delayed further until 2028, the two organisations have pledged to leverage their experience and expertise to demonstrate the viability and convenience of a Digital DRS.
DDRS Alliance has also published a Digital DRS Charter, which is designed to ensure alignment across all major DRS stakeholders in the UK and beyond. It is hoped that all proponents and stakeholders will sign up to the principles outlined within it.
Love’s Travel Stops
ParTech has announced the selection of PAR Data Central as the exclusive enterprise food management solution provider for Love’s Travel Stops network.
This encompasses brands such as Carl's Jr., Hardee's, Arby's, Bojangles, Taco John's, Love's Deli, Dairy Queen, Back40, Naf Naf, Subway, Godfather's, BB Subs, and Chester's, extending across country stores and travel stops throughout the United States.
Love's says that the move shows its commitment to streamlining back office operations and enhancing customer experience across its diverse portfolio of brands.
By incorporating PAR Data Central's Food and Inventory Management Solution into its stores and travel stops, it aims to optimise food cost tracking, improve reporting efficiency, and centralise operational processes.
Smith & Brock
Podfather fleet logistics software is being used by a UK-based fresh fruit and vegetable wholesaler for its delivery service to restaurants, hotels and caterers nationwide.
Making up to 7,000 deliveries a week, Smith & Brock is using Podfather’s logistics planning, route optimisation and ePOD solution to improve visibility across its mobile operation, boosting customer service and supporting its green objectives.
Prior to implementing Podfather, Smith & Brock relied heavily on paper-based workflows to manage the delivery of its fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy, dried and fine foods.
This caused problems when reports of non-delivered items were received as they had to wait for the paper manifest to be returned to the depot so they could see what had been signed for and by whom.
PLUS Retail
PLUS Retail, the third largest supermarket organisation in the Netherlands, has gone live with a new e-commerce platform.
In a LinkedIn post, Arvid Nieuwsma, Head of Product at PLUS Retail, said that this was inspired by the MACH Alliance.
“We created a headless and composable architecture, as this empowers us to differentiate locally on store level, and keeping up with the day-to-day innovation/best-of-breed choices,” he commented.
Key features: E2E event driven composable architecture, new e-commerce backbone courtesy of commercetools, new CMS (Contentful), new CIAM application (Thales Digital Identity and Security), and new headless front-end (OutSystems).
Nieuwsma said: “One of our ambitions was a faster time to market with features, in order to offer direct value and impact to our end customer. Thanks to feature toggle development and low code velocity we achieved this.”
“Second ambition was to be more flexible to make future choices in the underlying application landscape that better meet the needs, without having to overhaul the entire architecture.”
“Can you imagine the possibilities in differentiation on a local store level in terms of assortment, promotions and loyality programmes?”
He concluded: “We are over the moon that the time has come to accelerate on feature development, on value for the customer, our entrepreneurs and stores with this tech stack.”
KUIU
Performance outdoor apparel brand KUIU has extended its global direct to consumer (DTC) and marketing reach into 37 international markets in partnership with ESW.
KUIU was founded in 2011 with the vision of creating the highest quality ultralight hunting clothing and equipment, designed to be as affordable and accessible as possible.
With high demand for its products in its domestic North American markets of the US and Canada, it wanted to expand internationally and cultivate direct consumer relationships with shoppers in key European markets.
However, KUIU lacked the necessary technology and infrastructure and quickly realised developing these systems and processes in-house would take years of time it couldn’t afford to lose, as well as a significant investment of resources.
In 2017, it selected ESW because of the company’s experience in localisation in over 200 markets, its speed to market capability, and its expertise in knowing what drives scalable and sustainable DTC growth across international territories.
Grupo Merza
Retail space planning specialist CADS says that it has transformed Mexican grocery retailer and wholesaler Grupo Merza’s store planning process with its StoreSpace software.
Before implementing StoreSpace, Grupo Merza used Excel spreadsheets and email chains for store planning.
Experiencing inefficiencies in its process, the business sought to improve its knowledge of merchandisable space and how to manage it, in order to boost customer experience and store profitability.
Grupo Merza selected UK-based CADS due to its retail space planning expertise – and intuitive store planning software StoreSpace - to achieve its objectives.
StovesAreUs
Fluid Commerce, a Manchester-based e-commerce agency, has announced the launch of a newly redesigned website for StovesAreUs, leveraging Hyvä Themes on the Magento platform.
Dave Duffy, Director at StovesAreUs, says: “We are thrilled to unveil the new website, a testament to the incredible journey we've embarked on with Fluid Commerce. This strategic overhaul is not just a transformation; it's a renaissance for our brand's online presence.”
Landmark Group
SML RFID has been appointed by Middle East retail conglomerate, Landmark Group, as its strategic partner to deploy item level RFID solutions in its 600+ stores and 10 distribution centres across the MENA region.
Headquartered in Dubai, Landmark Group has over 2,200 stores across 21 countries and delivers products across categories including apparel, footwear, lifestyle, cosmetics, and home furnishing.
As part of the partnership, SML is providing RFID tags and has numerous sites live with its solutions and when fully rolled out will be in all of Landmark’s sites across all Gulf Cooperation Councils (GCC) countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman) Egypt and Jordan.
PervasID
PervasID has launched TrackMaster 2X. Using the company’s passive (battery free) RFID reader technology, this automates inventory and asset tracking in near real-time.
Retailers can now accurately monitor and locate goods within their stores using existing tags, eliminating the need for labour intensive manual handheld scanning, PervasID claims.
The solution is being rolled out by an (unnamed) fashion retailer in the UK, said to be a major player.
Musti Group
Nordic pet care specialist, Musti Group, is deepening its collaboration with RELEX Solutions.
A long-standing user of RELEX forecasting and replenishment capabilities, it is now implementing the firm’s space and assortment, workload forecasting, and capacity optimisation capabilities to boost its retail planning and supply chain planning processes.
Prior to adopting these capabilities, Musti utilised manual processes for space planning. Recognising the necessity to develop localised assortments and allocate space effectively to enhance operational efficiency, it acknowledged the requirement for a unified solution.
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