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

Can RFID Survive the “Internet of Things”?

Is the concept of the “Internet of Things” hindering RFID deployment?

It’s a grand vision: everything in the world talking to every other thing in the world. A frozen meal communicating with the refrigerator, microwave and automated shopping list; clothes giving instructions to a washing machine and dryer and consulting with an artificial intelligence fashion consultant in the wardrobe; a medicine cabinet reading medication instructions and automatically dispensing them for geriatric patients and reporting the dosage and time taken to the patient’s doctor…the list goes on.

Many of these grand visions are consumer-facing and that helps generate awareness of how RFID can provide everyday benefits to the average citizen. But they are also bad because…

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Tesco customers shop from iPhone

UK grocery giant Tesco is developing a mobile application to allow customers to manage their shopping though Apple’s iPhone.The new software will be produced to work with Apple’s iPhone, allowing users to search products by category or through simple text search, and to manage their shopping basket through the Apple phone.Source: Sky News

SmartShopIt.com Adds Smart Compare Feature

SmartShopIt.com releases its Smart Compare feature that provides valuable nutrition and price comparisons for grocery products nationwide.

SmartShopIt.com is a free site that helps its members eat healthier, shop more effectively, and save money at the grocery store. They have incorporated a new Smart Compare feature which helps their members by allowing them to easily and quickly compare grocery products. The Smart Compare feature leverages its database of price, nutritional information and ratings on over 90,000 products. The Smart Compare tool can be accessed on the desktop and mobile web device interfaces.

SmartShopIt.com

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

Samsung develops RFID chip for mobile handsets

Samsung Electronics has developed an RFID (radio frequency identification) chip it hopes will turn mobile phones into more useful tools to tell people about the products and services they want.

Samsung’s principal innovation in this area has been to design an RFID reader chip that can read different types of RFID tags. Normally, it takes more than one chip to read different kinds of RFID tags. The new chip will one day find its way into handheld devices, such as mobile phones, although the company did not say when that would happen.

When it does, people will be able to read RFID tags on products and other items meant to make the world an easier place to navigate. For example, some RFID tags on food or medicine products might give information on ingredients or dosages, while RFID tags at bus stops can offer schedules or tell when the next bus will arrive.<

The usefulness of RFID chips will grow as more companies put information on RFID tags and other devices meant for the technology. In Taiwan, for example, one local mobile network operator plans to work with movie theaters to put movie times on RFID tags in movie posters, so people can check on times while riding the subway or in popular shopping areas.

RFID technology is still in the early stages of use, a spokeswoman for Samsung in Seoul said, and Samsung currently has no timeline for when the RFID reader chips might enter mass production. The company plans to wait until RFID technology is more mature, she said.

Source: ARN

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.

Are RFID tags leading to a surveillance culture?

Radio frequency identification chips are already widely used in supermarkets and shops for the purpose of stock control, but some people fear their use could be widened to monitor the habits and behaviour of ordinary citizens. At the moment, these tags, which are little bigger than a grain of sand, are embedded into pints of milk and library books. When paired with an RFID reader, the tags can help to provide detailed information about items, such as their location, or how many there are.

Although most people are happy for RFID tags to be used in stores to monitor stock levels, they’re less happy about the idea of the chips still sending out a signal once they leave the shop. On a benign level, such tracking capabilities would mean a store would know that people in Hertfordshire prefer blue cashmere jumpers, while those in Aberdeen favour the brown versions. But on a more sinister level, it could also enable them to glean an unprecedented insight into our personal lives, and target their brands to us accordingly.

To those people who fear a “surveillance culture”, the ability to tag and track everything from our food to our clothes would be the next step on an already slippery slope.

Source: Big Brother is Watching You

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.

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IBM SmartStore Commercial