Canadian Tire Stores Get Smart

Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd. yesterday officially introduced its new Smart Store concept to Quebec, an initial $17-million investment.

The iconic national automotive and housewares chain has converted five local stores to the format, designed to make them more customer friendly and productive through renovations and reorganization.

Company president and chief executive officer Stephen Wetmore was in town to celebrate the grand reopening of those outlets, in Notre Dame de Grâce, St. Léonard, St. Laurent, Dollard des Ormeaux and Delson.

“Since opening our first (Quebec) store in Rouyn-Noranda in 1939, we have been focused on making continued investments in the Quebec market to ensure customers have the best possible shopping experience,” Wetmore said.

“The Smart Store represents the next phase of renewal. We are pleased to celebrate the grand opening of five Smart Stores in Montreal, and another two in the province (Alma and Sept Îles) next week.”

The company’s goal is to switch 110 of its 495 dealer-run stores (95 of them in Quebec) across the country by the end of 2010.

Since unveiling the concept, which won of a Retail Council of Canada award of excellence, 25 Canadian Tire stores have adopted the changes.

Source: Montreal Gazette

Adding the Analytic Dimension to RFID

Earlier this decade, Wal-Mart first required its top 100 suppliers to put radio frequency identification tags on shipping crates and pallets, then extended the mandate to include all suppliers. Thanks to the Wal-Mart mandate, the first wave of serious enterprise RFID deployments are on the books, and the result is a C, maybe a C-, in terms of ROI and maximum utilization of the technology. Many have completed their Wal-Mart compliance requirements so they can continue to do business with the retailing giant. However, few have taken the opportunity to go beyond, into the other areas of their business. Fewer still have incorporated other data sources into their application or produced analytic value with RFID data.

This is not to say that companies outside Wal-Mart mandate have not been adopting RFID. Retailers utilize RFID in their stores to manage temperatures, control theft and shrinkage, influence store design and product placement and even experiment with self-service checkout. Indeed, with billions of tags ordered, there are numerous uses for this tiny technology.

Read more @ information-management.com

Next Generation of Loyalty & Customer Relationship

Unified Grocers, Inc. Introduces Next Generation of Loyalty and Customer Relationship Software to Its Members Through Accelitec | interact

Unified Grocers, Inc., one of the largest member-owned grocery cooperatives in the western United States,
has begun introducing a next generation software service offered by Accelitec, Inc., to its members.

Accelitec | interact is an innovative software service that helps retailers move beyond the traditional way of discount pricing to improve customer retention and store profitability.

As the challenges of the current economy continue, the importance of delivering ongoing value, convenience, and relevancy to existing and new customers remains very high for Unified Grocer, Inc.’s independent retailers. Introducing Accelitec | interact to its independent retailers is an important way for Unified to help bolster the competitive advantage its members have in their local communities. Accelitec | interact enhances the shopping experience with a range of customer communications, including targeted marketing promotions,
recall notifications, and other unique value added services.

The RFID-enabled program can also be used to motivate specific customer behavior, such as driving sales of particular products, increasing per-trip spending and accelerating the rate of return trips. In an industry where pricing wars and perishable inventory are the norm, Accelitec | interact provides a way for independent retailers to differentiate their business without compromising lean margins or creating unsustainable customer expectations.

Source: Reuters

Smarter shopping

NOTHING, you’d think, would be more dynamic or up-to-the-minute than how we buy and sell. From the early Greek agoras to the modern superstore, markets have always been the most sensitive barometers of economic and societal change.

However, today’s retail model is struggling. It’s still largely a system built for the realities of an earlier era—a linear, push-based process where products are manufactured in isolation and put into market en masse from factory to truck to store, for customers who do the majority of their shopping in suburban malls.

Global retail today sees lead times as long as six to 10 months, forcing vendors to make significant bets on inventory, consumer trends and distribution methods—bloating supply chains with a stockpile of $1.2 trillion in excess merchandise.

At the same time, retailers lose a staggering $93 billion in missed sales every year, simply because they don’t have the right products in stock to meet customer demand. And that demand is more demanding and immediate than ever before: in the US, over 92 percent of adults conduct research online and seek the opinions of others before they ever purchase a product from a store.

To do business with shoppers on a smarter planet, retailers and manufacturers need a smarter system, one that bends retail’s global supply chain to these new realities. It needs to be interconnected, so the system can be fed by customer insight at every point in the process—all the way from design to distribution. It needs to be instrumented, so every item of inventory can be tracked and accounted for. And it needs to be intelligent, so vast amounts of customer data can be analyzed and turned into real value in real time.

The German Metro Group, one of the largest and most international retailing companies in the world, has introduced RFID technology throughout its entire supply chain, to help them get the products its customers want on the shelves when they want them. And top clothing designer Elie Tahari has built an inventory-reporting platform that’s helped it better match its products to customer demand.

By building intelligence into our entire retail system, retailers, manufacturers and suppliers can eliminate inefficiency and waste at every step of the chain—crucial in the current economic downturn. Even more important, retailers can better serve the new breed of empowered consumer, whose needs for high-value, individual service and low prices will only grow.

Source: businessmirror.com.ph

RFID & Consumer Electronics

Item-level tagging of Nokia mobile phones and accessories results in cost savings of 25%
UPM Raflatac is supplying UHF EPC Gen2 tags to Future Communications Company (FCC) based in the State of Kuwait. FCC is the main distributor of Nokia phones and accessories in Kuwait and runs more than 30 retail stores. The company is implementing RFID technology at item-level in its retail showroom in Kuwait City to improve customer service and maximize the efficiency of inventory management.

Checkpoint Systems Supports METRO Group’s ”Tag It Easy!”

Checkpoint Systems, Inc, a global leader in shrink management, merchandise visibility, and apparel labeling solutions, today announced the expansion of METRO Group’s RFID “Tag It Easy!” program.

This third phase of the program will involve more than 75 Chinese and Indian consumer goods suppliers, in addition to the 100 manufacturers already in the program from Hong Kong, China and Vietnam. “Tag It Easy!” participants apply RFID labels on shipments bound for METRO Group’s facilities in Germany.

The “Tag It Easy!” program is part of METRO Group’s Advanced Logistics Asia (ALA) initiative to improve logistics processes with its Asian suppliers, using RFID to track merchandise throughout the supply chain. METRO Group developed the “Tag It Easy!” program with Checkpoint, a strategic partner of METRO Group’s Future Store Initiative, to assist suppliers in using RFID within their operations. As an exclusive third-party solutions provider Checkpoint continues to supply pre-printed RFID labels and services to suppliers in the region.

Read more

Internet retailing and the smart store

The Internet has quickly become a meaningful selling channel in its own right, one that is replacing catalogs and is the biggest retail channel besides store based shopping. Technology and lessons from tracking best practices at retail web sites has the potential to enhance store-based shopping. It is inevitable that the distinction between store based shopping and Internet shopping becomes blurred as each channel incorporates ideas and successes from each. In time stores will become smart stores and web sites will incorporate retail services to give you a seamless experience in shopping.

Just what each channel will embrace with trial and error is anyones guess. It does seem possible that we may eventually end up with a single service that incorporates both real stores and virtual stores using a mix of smart technology in hardware with useful data and online services.

Future Store Demo

Video of the services that Future Store in Germany offers.

Wal-Mart – Do-It-Yourself is easier for RFID

Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club division announced a dramatic drop in its compliance penalties for failure to put RFID tags on pallets sent to its distribution centers.

Initially, Sam’s said that failure to meet these deadlines would result in modest “chargeback” penalties – $2.00 per pallet initially, and $3.00 per pallet in 2009.

Even at these levels, some consumer goods vendors were considering accepting the charge rather than investing in RFID tagging capabilities. The cost, some told SCDigest last year, was not in the tags itself or even the printing equipment, but the process costs and added complexity that the tagging would bring for what most companies is a relatively small piece of their overall business.

Now, Sam’s has dropped the penalty to a mere 12 cents per pallet, reflecting the incremental cost of adding a tag to a pallet that arrives at a DC without one.

Sam’s Club has invested in RFID and related automation in its own DCs, and therefore reached a “tipping point” where it will be much cheaper for it to perform the pallet tagging than it will be for its vendors.

Source: scdigest.com

Clothing Designer Hopes to become a SmartStore

At its store in Hollola, Finland, women’s clothing designer Naisten Pukutehdas(NP) has extended its RFID system to the sales floor. The company—which sells women’s fashion, marketed under the NP Collection brand, at 500 retail locations in Scandinavia and Russia, as well as in 10 of its own stores—has created what it hopes to be a smart store, employing RFID sensors in its dressing rooms and on its shelves to provide customers with better, more personalized service.The Hollola store, a new retail location that opened in November, is utilizing a Senso Retail Solutions system, provided by Rosendahl Digital Networks (RDN), to help shoppers identify purchases, as well as to assist staff members in improving inventory management and security. The store’s workers will use the system for daily inventory checks, to obtain real-time data regarding which inventory is on the shelves and automatic notices when it is time to replenish.In the first half of 2009, NP expects to have the Senso fitting room and Senso Shelf systems deployed at all stores the company owns and operates in Finland. “RFID has been a strategic decision,” Rosendahl says. “During this [asset-tracking system deployment] process, we have realized that RFID is not only for saving costs. The main benefit for us will be the new shop and service concepts. We believe that better customer service, as well as lower cost, will be very important for our business.”Source: rfidjournal.com