No more empty shelves! It is possible: Discover how

Digital innovation is profoundly changing traditional retail

As emerged from the Survey on Retail by the Osservatorio Innovazione Digitale from the Milan Polytechnic presented yesterday – 16th November – during “The Future Retail: between Tradition and Innovation” Convention, digital innovation is profoundly changing traditional retail, from large Distribution Groups to small/medium-size Italian retailers. It is a growing transformation process, still slow, as “just a 42% of big retailers considers innovation a key factor to compete and succeed and presents a clear, well-defined digital strategy, personally formulated by its CEO.

And the rest of them? Is it clear what happens for example when the consumer, nowadays increasingly exigent and informed, finds himself in front of an empty shelf in a supermarket?

By comparing diverse realities, we have often witnessed how store operators go around aisles, make a note of the missing items, run to the backend PC and manually place the order. How long has it taken them to perform this operation? Are we sure the data entered are correct?

Let us now imagine there should be an application that allowed operators to precisely know about sold and ordered goods and goods about to arrive, to be guided in reordering activities and operations transferring items from one store to another, to print labels with new-promotion prices… All this on the aisle, without any need to use the backend PC.

Let us imagine too that this application should allow Store Managers to visualize from a single, clear and immediate interface, all the store operations, from reordering or inventory to goods transfers, all of it relying on the certainty and safety that receiving real-time data provides.

Which could be the benefits of this application for business?

1. Centralised process control: one only point to monitor all the store operations
2. Timing: operations are performed directly on the aisle by a single device, no need to run to the backend PC
3. Data safety: the operator is guided by the information present in the application, allowing him immediate checks, throughout all the activities on the aisle

Who can directly tell us about their experience? Unicomm (Emisfero, Famila, Super A&O, Mega, Emi, Cash&Carry, Central Cash, Hurrà), Gruppo Poli, Aspiag (Despar, Eurospar, Interspar), which we will shorly examine in depth.