Including Netto, Waitrose, Dunelm, and Bestseller: June’s biggest retail technology plays at a glance

RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, deployments and pilots from June, including Foot Locker, Voyado, Aptos, NCR, Asda, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Tractor Supply Company, WHSmith, Xiatech, Holland & Barrett, Big 5 Sporting Goods, FreedomPay, Prada Group, and Adyen.

Netto

VusionGroup has announced the roll-out of its smart digital labels and solutions at Netto, the Danish discount grocery chain owned by Salling Group.

Salling Group, a partner of VusionGroup for more than 15 years, will deploy SESimagotag’s digital labels and the VusionCloud platform across its 550 Netto locations from Q3 2024 to Q2 2025.

As a result, Netto will be able to display product information, promotions and branding elements.

“We are constantly striving to improve the customer experience in our stores. The solutions from VusionGroup will allow us to provide our customers with clearer product information, more impactful promotions, and a more modern store environment for an enhanced shopping experience,” comments Alan Jensen, Executive Vice President, IT & Digital of Salling Group.

Foot Locker

Foot Locker has launched its reimagined loyalty programme, FLX Rewards, across North America.

Kim Waldmann, Global Chief Customer Officer, says: “It all started by listening intently to our customers, and they were super clear on what they wanted from us - access to sneaker heat, exclusive rewards, and recognition of their loyalty in the form of cash back.”

“And so that’s what we delivered, showcasing our commitment to deepening customer relationships and expanding sneaker culture to more consumers across the globe.”

Later this year, meanwhile, Foot Locker will launch a new mobile app featuring real-time product launch updates, enhanced storytelling, a streamlined shopping experience and a forthcoming “Store Mode,” with the aim of enabling a more seamless omnichannel experience and connectivity for team members.

Waldmann concludes: “I am incredibly proud of the teams that worked to deliver these customer centric innovations, both significant milestones in our overall Lace Up plan.”

Walgreens Boots Alliance

Supply chain management solution provider, TradeBeyond, reports that Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) Global Sourcing has selected its platform to optimise and standardise the company’s operations across its retail brands and to leverage more innovative and agile sourcing practices. 

This will be used to manage numerous processes within WBA’s Global Sourcing function, as well as overall sourcing and order management follow up.

It will also replace several legacy and redundant systems with the aim of creating digital efficiencies, unifying processes, and facilitating data transparency and integrity. 

Dunelm

Dunelm has announced the roll-out of omnichannel gift cards, in partnership with Stored Value Solutions (SVS).

In a LinkedIn post, Thiago Palharini, Senior Product Manager at Dunelm, said: “This huge project touched virtually every system in the company, and it took a massive team effort to pull off.”

“Now, you can buy Dunelm gift cards online and in-store, which can be used both ways. Perfect for gifting to someone you love.”

“A special shoutout to our fantastic teams in customer care, FinTech, order management, marketing, finance, and customer comms.”

“So proud to be part of these teams and deliver something that has the potential to be a game-changer for our business!”

Malc Berg, SVP Business and Account Development Executive at SVS, commented: “Great to be working with Dunelm. Superb achievement. Huge congrats to all involved. We’re proud to be in partnership with you.”

Long John Silver’s

Long John Silver’s has partnered with Attentive, Bikky, Plein Air, and Sparkfly to implement a digital and in-store customer experience across more than 300 corporate stores and participating franchisees.

This will leverage a suite of platforms including Attentive’s CRM and SMS Messaging; Bikky’s Customer Data Platform; Plein Air’s Web and Mobile App; and Sparkfly’s Offer Management, Loyalty, Digital Wallet, and PoS Middleware Platform, with the aim of creating more meaningful messages, offers, and digital experiences for LJS guests.

“We're dedicated to delivering treasured moments for our customers,” says Jason Antony, Director of Digital Marketing at Long John Silver’s.

“By incorporating this cutting-edge technology into one 360° engagement ecosystem, we're excited to seamlessly blend the online and in-store experience and cater to today’s modern, digital first consumer.”

WSS

WSS is to deploy Aptos ONE PoS across 100+ stores in the United States.

Built on the Aptos ONE microservices-based platform, this is a mobile first application that aims to streamline and enhance in-store experiences for WSS’ shoppers and associates and reduce the hardware footprint in each location.

Founded in 1984 and acquired by Foot Locker, in 2021, WSS is a footwear, apparel and accessories retailer that offers top sportswear and private label brands.

For nearly a decade, it has leveraged Aptos software to support its retail operations.

This includes the use of solutions to manage inventory (Merchandising), engage customers (PoS, CRM), fulfil orders (OMS), audit transactions (Sales Audit) and analyse business performance (Analytics). 

Asda

Asda has completed the roll-out of new NCR Point of Sale (PoS) software across its store estate.

In a LinkedIn post, Kevin Besford, Senior Director - Retail Future at Asda, said: “A huge thank you to everyone involved in this extremely ambitious project.”

He added: “This commitment is driving us forward as we continue to build our brand new Asda digital landscape. An even bigger thank you to all our store colleagues who’ve continued to work extremely hard in serving our customers through this time of change.”

“A massive well done to everyone involved in the Asda front end programme, a massive cross functional effort to mobilise across 612 stores.”

The project included 16,674 checkouts, 6,211 physical installs, 27,888 scan and go devices updated, with deployment peaking at 42 stores per week, and over 30,000 colleagues newly trained.

Besford concluded: “An amazing collaboration across the Retail, Tech and NCR teams to get this done.”

Macy’s

Macy’s has announced go live for a major PoS checkout modernisation project.

In a LinkedIn post, Naga Tirumala Rao Chillapalli, Technical Engineering Manager at Macy’s, said: “Modernising Point of Sale is no small feat, involving the replacement of registers, modernising PoS applications, and backend integrations.”

“It requires extensive collaboration between product, business, change management, software vendors, store leadership, and cross-functional teams.”

He added: “In my role as a manager, this project has been both a challenge and a triumph. I've had the privilege of overseeing multiple facets of the project, from development to Enactor configurations, environments, PoS labs, testing, SRE and QA automation. It's been a journey of growth and learning, and I'm immensely proud of the progress we've made together.”

“I couldn't be prouder of my team and the entire project team. This achievement is a testament to the incredible teamwork, dedication, and collaboration of everyone involved.”

“Together, we have overcome challenges, embraced change, and delivered a solution that will drive positive impact for our customers and store colleagues.”

The new Point of Sale systems are now live at Macy’s Mall of Georgia.

Chillapalli concluded: “We will continue to build on this momentum, innovate, and deliver exceptional experiences for our customers and colleagues.”

Walgreens Boots Alliance

Walgreens Boots Alliance has deployed Zebra Technolgies’ Workcloud Actionable Intelligence software to enhance operational compliance and the company’s ability to identify and combat shrink.

It selected Zebra’s Modern Store framework to improve asset protection, better equip employees with technology, and optimise operational visibility in its network of 8,000 locations across 50 states.

As an essential retailer carrying critical healthcare products and prescription medications, Walgreens needed an intuitive analytics solution to uncover issues and resolve areas of loss in real-time.

“Recognising the advantages of today's digital technologies, we implemented Zebra’s leading-edge software and hardware solutions to streamline our operations and better support our employees and customers,” says Tim Bailey, Senior Manager, Asset Protection Solutions, Walgreens Boots Alliance.

“The integration of Zebra's solutions has yielded positive outcomes, empowering our business with tools to enhance associate engagement, improve inventory accuracy, and elevate the customer experience.”

Studenac

Croatian retailer, Studenac, has announced plans to build a new distribution centre near the country’s capital Zagreb that will open next year, deploying solutions to enhance the efficiency and capacity of its logistics network, ensuring shorter delivery times to stores and improving collaboration with suppliers.

The facility in Velika Gorica will cover 36,000 square metres and eventually create approximately 500 new jobs.

Studenac, which is owned by a fund managed by Enterprise Investors, a private equity firm in Central and Eastern Europe, currently has a central distribution centre in Dugopolje, near the coastal city of Split, which supports cross-dock operations in Zadar, as well as semi cross-docks in Dubrovnik, Pazin, Zagreb and Kutina.

JCPenney

JCPenney has unveiled a new upgrade to its 1.67 million square foot Reno, Nevada distribution centre.

As part of the retailer’s self-funded $1 billion reinvestment strategy announced last year, it has invested $40 million in updating the equipment and infrastructure of the Reno facility to increase order efficiency and speed for online shoppers.

The centrepiece of the upgrade is the implementation of the Joey Pouch sorting system, a computerised induction, sorting and packing system.

It includes new induction process technologies, a fully automated sorter to assemble orders and a new packing system that includes invoice and shipping label printing for each order in the station.

The upgrade is expected to improve the customer experience by ensuring that online orders are complete with higher accuracy and shipped out more quickly.

Tractor Supply Company

US retailer Tractor Supply Company has completed a chain wide roll-out of data and AI powered co-pilot capabilities with Quorso.

This provides store team members with personalised, top priority actions, and intelligent workflows for store operations.

Founded in 1938, Tractor Supply Company is an American chain of stores that sells products for home improvement, agriculture, lawn and garden maintenance, livestock, equine and pet care for recreational farmers and ranchers, pet owners, and landowners

In a LinkedIn post, Glenn Allison, Vice President, IT Applications Development, said: “The data driven insights include improvement opportunities such as proactively addressing out of stock inventory, product facing issues with store planogram, damaged product, and various other use cases to improve operations.”

“Thank you to the team and Quorso that helped support the chain wide roll-out.”

Crew Clothing

Cegid has expanded its partnership with Crew Clothing, with the brand now implementing the Newsfeed feature within Cegid Retail Store Excellence.

The British lifestyle label has been a user of the task management and retail operations platform since 2009 and has just rolled-out Newsfeed to its 105 stores.

This aims to bridge the gap between Crew’s management and store teams.

It’s helping the teams see not only company wide updates but also updates based on their store, role and interests.

The Newsfeed feature will also be rolled-out to Crew Clothing’s latest openings in Canterbury, Stow-on-the-Wold, and soon to launch stores in Monmouth and London Paddington.

Bestseller

Voyado has announced a partnership with Bestseller to help it drive increased customer loyalty and deliver hyper-personalised experiences across all touchpoints.

Bestseller operates more than 20 brands, including JACK & JONES, Vero Moda, and Only.

These brands offer clothing and accessories for women, men, teenagers, and children in more than 16,000 multi-brand and department stores and approximately 3,000 branded Bestseller retail stores around the world.

This includes 70 countries in America, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the Middle East. 

Steffen Simonsen, Head of Brand Tech, says: "The initial scope of our project was to acquire a loyalty management solution to integrate with our existing marketing automation platform.”

“However, we quickly saw the power of Voyado's unified solution to manage the loyalty programme and leverage the loyalty mechanisms seamlessly in our customer communication across all channels.”

"We realised that to be successful with our loyalty initiative, it would be critical to enable our users to get insights and act on all customer data, including loyalty data, as efficiently as possible.”

“This efficiency allows us to turn great ideas in the morning into impactful customer experiences by the afternoon without dependencies from central IT.”

UNTUCKit

NewStore has announced the extension of its partnership with UNTUCKit.

It says that the renewal highlights “the significant value the NewStore Unified Commerce Platform has delivered over the past six years, cementing the brand’s position as one of the world’s fastest growing and most innovative omnichannel retailers”.

Since going live in 2018, UNTUCKit has expanded its store footprint from 25 to more than 80 locations across the US, Canada, and the UK.

During that time, the organisation achieved a 40x return on its initial investment thanks to the incremental revenue driven by the platform’s omnichannel features. In the last year alone, that translated to a 19% uplift on UNTUCKit’s bottom line.

“When we re-evaluated the market, many vendors claimed to offer a lower total cost of ownership, but none were able to unlock growth in the same way as NewStore,” says Aaron Sanandres, Co-Founder and CEO, UNTUCKit.

“There is much talk about the promise of omnichannel in retail today, but it is clear that NewStore has the only platform to enable a truly unified customer experience across all our channels.”

Leroy Merlin

Hanshow and Leroy Merlin have partnered to deploy ESLs across over 50,000 products integrated with the the latter’s mobile app in France.

Customers can now experience easy product geolocation and personalised recommendations in Leroy Merlin stores. After 18 months of R&D, the retailer implemented a fully customised solution in all its outlets.

Leroy Merlin’s integration of Hanshow ESL into its app offers geolocation in-store to guide customers to products and aisles.

The ESL solution also provides price consistency between online and offline channels, boosting the user experience with various features such as customer reviews, enriched product descriptions, access the Home Index to assess a product's environmental and social impact, and the ability to flash labels directly from the application.

WHSmith

WHSmith has chosen Xiatech, the company behind Xfuze, pitched as the world’s first composable hyper-integration platform, as its partner to support the acceleration of the business’ growth and international expansion.

The ten-year partnership will involve WHSmith deploying Xfuze to create a real-time, hyper-connected business by integrating the system landscape and creating a single view of trusted data (including customers, sales, product, inventory), supporting the retailer’s operations and decision-making across its global business.

Lyndon Hearn, Group CIO, WHSmith, says: “As a business operating in more than 30 countries around the world, we are always looking at how we can consistently deliver the best possible experience for our customers, no matter where they shop with us.”

“We are excited to partner with Xiatech whose innovative integration, data and analytics platform offers us rapid feedback and insights from across our business, helping us stay connected to the needs of our colleagues, customers and suppliers and helping us to always be there for every one of life’s journeys.”

Walmart

Walmart has announced drone delivery, Generative AI powered shopping assistant and digital shelf labels initiatives

It began trialing drone delivery in 2021 and has completed over 30,000 deliveries to date.

Earlier this year, it announced the largest drone delivery expansion of any US retailer, bringing this to up to 75% of the Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) population.

As a next step, Walmart is focused on bringing the experience directly to the Walmart app.

Starting in June, customers in DFW will begin to be notified of the new ordering capability through the app if they are eligible for drone delivery based on the address associated with their account.  

The integration will be done in phases as more drone delivery sites launch and drone providers receive additional regulatory approvals to fly more goods across greater distances.   

Holland & Barrett

MRI Software has announced a partnership with Holland & Barrett, a UK health and wellness retailer that has over 1,000 stores across the UK and Europe.

By leveraging AI driven technology from MRI OnLocation for Footfall Analytics, Holland & Barrett will gain  insights into store performance metrics within its portfolio as well as visibility relative to the broader UK market.

Big 5 Sporting Goods

Big 5 Sporting Goods is joining FreedomPay’s platform as it looks to bring enhanced commerce security and capabilities to its 424 stores across the United States.

“Big 5 is excited to start this new partnership with FreedomPay,” says Michael Shinagawa, CIO  & SVP, IT at Big 5 Sporting Goods Corp.

“This collaboration will allow us to continue our commitment to providing exceptional value and service to its customers.”

The tie up aims to give customers a fast, frictionless, and secure checkout experience in-store, enhanced by FreedomPay’s data driven platform to enable loyalty and incentives.

“Together, FreedomPay and Big 5 Sporting Goods are creating a more seamless customer experience,” says Nate Ware, SVP Sales & Digital Development at FreedomPay.

“FreedomPay is tapped by the top retail brands around the world to transform payments and we’re excited to partner with Big 5 Sporting Goods to bring a next level experience to their customers.”

Prada Group

Adyen has announced a new partnership with Prada Group to innovate the payment experience in-store.

The latter is leveraging Tap to Pay on iPhone in its US and Milan stores with additional markets going live in the near future.

Adyen supports Tap to Pay on iPhone which enables the Group to accept all forms of contactless payments – including contactless credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, and other digital wallets – with no additional hardware or payment terminal needed.

As a result, customers no longer need to queue at a register, and instead can checkout directly with their sales associate in-store.

"We are working on scaling our omnichannel solutions on the platform to connect each sale across all channels. We need to make everything seamless. We believe Adyen is the right partner to help us collect and manage all our payments data efficiently,” says Cristiano Agostini, Prada Group Chief Information Officer.

Giant Eagle

Bridg, a division of Cardlytics, reports that Giant Eagle’s Leap Media Group, the regional grocer’s in-house retail media network, has joined the Rippl data and media network – a purpose built collective between regional grocers, convenience stores, and their advertisers.

Powered by Bridg’s cookie less identity resolution technology, Rippl aims to significantly enhance regional retailers’ first-party data and provide advertisers with a single access point to a national footprint of 70 million+ individual shopper profiles (loyalty and non-loyalty) with SKU-level purchase data and enriching attributes..

Using previously unavailable insights, advertisers can now tailor audiences based on actual product preferences, effectively execute single campaigns across multiple retailers, and consistently measure campaign performance across an aggregated landscape that is now the fifth largest provider of grocery and convenience store first-party, verified shopper data in the United States.

Waitrose

Waitrose is working with Trust Retail, a Trust Payments company, to implement a new system which aims to improve store availability and free up Partner time for customer facing activities. 

The tie up will involve rolling out a more dynamic store inventory management system which will give stores a near real-time view of their stock position and improve data driven decisions.

Waitrose is investing heavily in new technology across its supply chain and recently laid claim to significant progress in availability, which now stands at record levels.

Under the Trust Retail system, Waitrose Partners will be able to receive stock quickly and efficiently, which will allow their time to be diverted to other customer facing tasks.