Including Lick, wagamama, Ackermans, and PacSun: 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 SPAR UK, Beef 'O' Brady’s, Etihad Airways, The Perfume Shop, SkateHut, Punch Pubs, and Dorfladen Freckenfeld – Powered by EDEKA Paul.
SPAR UK
SPAR UK has launched a new way for shoppers to win discounts on all its own label products this summer, with vouchers worth £3, £2, and £1 up for grabs.
The Make Me a Champion SCAN-MATCH-WIN competition offers shoppers the chance to win money off everything from SPAR Thin & Crispy Pepperoni Pizza, Breaded Chicken Nuggets, and Hand Cooked Sea Salt Crisps.
Shoppers can also enter to win a weekly cash prize of £1,000 by scanning the QR code in their local SPAR store or visiting a dedicated website.
Beef 'O' Brady's
Beef 'O' Brady's, a US-based sports bar and grill chain, has announced a collaboration with SoundHound to enable customers to place phone orders for pick-up via a voice AI ordering system.
The company operates in more than 20 states across the US.
Initially live in all corporate locations - and now available for integration into franchises - SoundHound’s voice AI technology is trained on Beef 'O’Brady’s extensive menu and designed to understand regular human speech so that customers can order by speaking naturally.
Beyond taking orders, the tech can answer a variety of menu related questions, provide information about specials and promotions, and handle inquiries about opening times, parking, allergens, and other frequently asked questions.
Dorfladen Freckenfeld – Powered by EDEKA Paul
The local village store had been closed since May 2023 and was recently reopened with a new operator and a new concept: as a 24/7 grocery store with self-service.
Diebold Nixdorf equipped the store called Dorfladen Freckenfeld – Powered by EDEKA Paul with two DN Series EASY eXpress self-service checkouts for cashless payment.
Both systems run in a special unmanned mode keeping them ready for use at all times, for example, by deleting uncompleted transactions after a timer has expired.
In the mornings, employees are on site to replenish the shelves and assist customers when required.
During this temporary presence of staff, the purchase of age restricted goods such as alcoholic beverages – the range in the village store includes numerous products from local winegrowers – can also be carried out using automatic, AI-based age verification.
When an item is scanned at the self-service checkout, the Vynamic Smart Vision I Age Verification solution from Diebold Nixdorf asks customers whether or not they would like automatic age recognition.
Once consent has been given, the customer's facial characteristics are analysed using a camera installed on the system and sophisticated AI algorithms determine their age. If this age is above a predefined threshold, the transaction can be continued.
Lick
Lick, a UK headquartered home décor brand, is using Oracle NetSuite.
With the tech, it has been able to take advantage of an integrated business suite to automate and consolidate financial processes, gain a clearer view across its growing international operations, and optimise its management of inventory and working capital.
Launched in 2019, Lick has established itself as a multi-million pound, multi-channel business, helping customers in the UK, Europe and the US transform their homes with its range of paint, wallpaper, and decorating tools.
As home decoration surged during the pandemic, Lick’s disconnected inventory and finance software systems struggled to keep pace with demand and burdened team members with time-consuming manual workarounds.
To simplify and scale its growing international operations, expand visibility, and gain greater control over inventory and costs, it selected NetSuite as its global enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Etihad Airways
Etihad Guest, the loyalty programme of Etihad Airways, has extended its partnership with Pointspay in a move that will lead to the first introduction of a new solution to the Middle East region later this year.
This introduces the ability for members to earn and redeem Etihad Guest miles via online retailers.
By integrating this new solution, members will be able to incorporate the programme into their daily lives, with the aim of transforming how they earn and redeem their miles across a variety of retail partners within the ecosystem.
This enables them to save money, expand their options for earning and redeeming miles, and accelerate their path to earning rewards such as upgrades and more.
wagamama
wagamama, a British restaurant chain, serving Asian food based on Japanese cuisine, has launched a new loyalty app called soul club.
Customers will earn a hanko stamp each time they visit a wagamama restaurant and spend £12. After three stamps, they receive a free side and after six stamps, a free main with no minimum spend.
When people first sign up, they will also get a free stamp and a free side of edamame beans. When it's their birthday, they get entered into a prize draw where they could win a £1,000 gift card.
It’s also possible to gain access to various extras on the app including recipes, cooking videos, secret menu items, and access to supper clubs.
After four visits in one year, users will receive invites to supper clubs to cooking classes with wagamama collaborators. After eight visits in one year, they get VIP Status, which includes the opportunity to win premium monthly merch drops, such as hoodies and cookbooks.
The Perfume Shop
Specialist fragrance retailer, The Perfume Shop (TPS), says that it has seen “out on time” shipment rates across the UK and Ireland hit 99.2% and also implemented “ship from store” following the appointment of Scurri as its delivery management partner.
TPS is the UK’s largest specialist fragrance retailer with 209 stores in UK&I as well as an e-commerce offering. It is part of health and beauty giant AS Watson Group.
Having invested £2.5 million in warehouse automation technology at its Dunstable warehouse, it appointed Scurri to optimise its delivery management.
Prior to this, delivery management issues were escalated to management on a regular basis - forcing TPS personnel to step in and solve unwanted delivery problems.
Additionally, lack of system reliability was also a challenge, particularly during Peak, and while TPS were able to shield customers from these issues, it often came at significant efficiency costs within the warehouse.
Ackermans
Ackermans has announced implementation of the Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service (MFP), replacing the former enterprise planning (EP) system.
The primary objective of the project was to replace the outdated EP system with Oracle MFP, a more robust and efficient solution tailored to meet the evolving needs of the business.
This necessitated a market evaluation to find a tool better suited to the company's needs. Following a tender and evaluation process, Oracle emerged as the ideal partner for this transition.
“The transition to Oracle MFP represents a crucial improvement in our planning capabilities. We are confident that this upgrade will enhance our operational efficiency and provide our customers with a better shopping experience through improved product availability and planning accuracy,” says Imke Henning, Business & Systems Integration Manager at Ackermans.
The Paper Store
The Paper Store is now live running Jumpmind Commerce, Jumpmind’s flagship Point of Sale (PoS) offering.
This has been deployed on 800 Apple iPad and iPhone devices, across its estate of 105+ store locations.
With its microservices-based, API-first and cloud-native architecture, Jumpmind Commerce powers PoS and “endless aisle” customer fulfilment through integration with The Paper Store’s existing order management system.
The retailer is also leveraging Jumpmind Inventory to support streamlined back of house merchandise receiving, as well as replenishment to the store floor.
It has also deployed the Jumpmind Promote unified promotion solution. This is enabling it to run more than 200 concurrent promotions, eliminating complexity and the use of multiple legacy platforms.
PacSun
PacSun has gone live on the Census Embedded in the SoundCommerce Data Platform.
It is one of the first brands to tap into the new Census-SoundCommerce partnership, where Census Embedded provides a complete reverse ETL and data activation solution for SoundCommerce customers, for best practice data management.
“SoundCommerce serves as PacSun’s composable Customer Data Platform, landing modelled data in a managed instance of GCP BigQuery, which acts as our customer and marketing data warehouse," says Shirley Gao, PacSun Chief Digital and Information Officer.
"With Census Embedded in SoundCommerce, our digital teams can now enhance data integration and activation more efficiently, unlocking opportunities to better engage and serve PacSun customers.”
SkateHut
UK-based skateboarding retailer SkateHut is gearing up for a sales boom when the sport returns for the Paris 2024 Olympics, following a debut at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics that made Team GB’s bronze medal winning teenager Sky Brown a household name, and resulted in an increase in cross-generational participation.
As SkateHut prepares for a surge in sales in decks, trucks, wheels and protective gear, it has invested in technology to ensure it can cope with the summer order spike.
Central to this is its deployment of Descartes Peoplevox, an e-commerce warehouse management system, and Shipster, a custom shipping integration platform which connects online retailers, warehouses and distributors with over 100 couriers.
The collaboration has also expanded to Linnworks, the e-commerce software, which connects to sales channels like eBay and Amazon.
LS Retail and FreedomPay
LS Retail, an Aptos company, has partnered with FreedomPay.
Over 100,000+ retail, restaurant, pharmacy, forecourt, and hospitality businesses use LS Retail software solutions to manage their entire operation.
LS Central is its retail management system that extends Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP with industry specific functionality. The solution enables businesses to run back office operations, sales, financials, inventory, e-commerce, customer loyalty, and more on a single platform.
LS Pay is an electronic fund transfer (EFT) software solution that enables businesses using LS Central to have a choice when it comes to selecting a payment service provider (PSP) with out-of-the-box support for several PSPs in multiple regions.
FreedomPay’s platform combines security, identity, payments, loyalty, and business intelligence into one solution, enabling businesses to offer a hyper-personalised purchasing experience for their customers while ensuring the highest level of safety and compliance across all channels.
Due to this new partnership, businesses running their operations on LS Retail software will be able to connect not only to FreedomPay, but also to any of the PSPs that leverage the white labeled FreedomPay technology stack.
POC
POC, a Swedish manufacturer of helmets, protection, eyewear and apparel for cycling and skiing, has launched a flagship direct-to-consumer (DTC) online store, localised to sell in various global markets, in partnership with Centra.
POC products are available through a network of wholesale partners worldwide, ranging from general and specialist sports, cycling and winter sport retailers to international retailers.
Wanting to offer an information rich, immersive and seamless customer experience across all its touchpoints, it realised a process of digital transformation was necessary to create a DTC channel.
To support this transition, POC selected Centra, because of its rapid multi-market scalability as well as its ability to serve POC’s global market from one site and on one centralised system.
Partnering with digital product agency, Umain, to develop the site frontend, the new flagship site, which serves 35 countries in four languages and supports 13 currencies, launched in June.
Punch Pubs
Quadient has bagged a new contract with Punch Pubs in the UK.
This will see the deployment of the former’s Parcel Pending open locker network across 1,261 pub locations managed by Punch Pubs, providing parcel deliveries and returns for communities nationwide.
Quadient says that its approach to selecting optimal locations is based on detailed partner carrier data, to pinpoint areas with delivery bottlenecks and high population density.
Within Punch Pubs’ network mapping, Quadient has identified 400 premium locations as a starting point, with initial installations planned as soon as October.
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