Superior Scanning Enables BYOD Strategy and Boosts Performance

Founded in 1973 by Micky Jagtiani, Landmark Group has grown from one store in Bahrain into one of the largest retail and hospitality conglomerates in the Middle East, Africa and India.

Landmark Retail is part of the Landmark Group and operates around 5,000 stores across 21 countries today. Their focus is to provide a value-driven, diverse range of brands for the entire family across fashion, footwear, lifestyle, beauty, sport, home décor and electronics.

As an innovator in digital technology, Landmark Retail wanted to optimize in-store operations, by empowering store associates to use their own smart devices for anything from enhancing the customer experience to completing operational tasks.

We needed our Landmark retail employee app to scan with the same speed and accuracy irrespective of the devices and cameras being used to support our BYOD strategy. We tested different vendor scanning solutions but Scandit Smart Data Capture outperformed them all.

Juan Vega, Head of Digital Product for Retail, Landmark Group

Challenge

In their drive to enhance store operations, Landmark Retail wanted to:

• Adapt their store operations by replacing old Portable Data Terminal (PDT) devices with newer smart devices.
• Make the change without investing heavily in company-owned devices.
• Partner with a vendor to help integrate high-performance data capture in their store operations app to support a new device strategy. Landmark’s high-volume brands, in particular, generate vast amounts of data and the retailer needed a more efficient way to manage it.

Replace dedicated scanners with a smartphone device strategy

One of the main objectives was to boost digital transformation by moving away from dedicated scanning devices and adopting smartphones for store operations.

They wanted to empower store associates to use their own devices, enabled by the Landmark Retail app, to carry out a range of essential everyday retail tasks such as inventory management, without compromising operational performance or productivity.

Additionally, many of Landmark Retail’s employees are inexperienced and reducing churn is a key focus. So, it was essential to give store associates familiar tools they could work with easily straight away and continue to use with high levels of employee satisfaction.

The challenge, therefore, was implementing a BYOD (bring your own device) strategy with the Landmark Retail app that would scan and perform equally well on different smartphone devices and in any challenging store environments, such as dim light or damaged codes.

Speed and accuracy were crucial scanning features for Landmark Retail’s high-volume product brand. It was necessary to keep stock moving through stores and fulfill online orders quickly and efficiently. This is essential to allow customers to buy what they like when they like and for Landmark to build and retain customer loyalty.

Solution

Having created an app for store operations, Landmark Retail integrated Scandit Smart Data Capture after extensive testing as the best solution for efficient and accurate barcode scanning. Several other scanning-related factors were key to the selection of Scandit:

• Irrespective of which device and camera was being used – scanning must always be fast and accurate. Especially for some of Landmark Retail’s value brands who depend on high-volume scanning.
• During in-store customer interactions, scanning performance needs to be easy, natural and guaranteed – so employees can focus on providing the best customer service possible.

Juan Vega, Head of Digital Product for Retail, Landmark Group, explains: “We had developed the employee app and we knew we wanted it to work equally effectively on different smartphone models and in different store conditions. We tested the scanning performance of different vendors over two days. It was clear that the Scandit SDK scanning solution was the fastest and most accurate in all the scenarios, so we deployed it.”

An accurate and fast smart data capture solution for any device

The flexibility and high performance of the scanning solution supported the BYOD strategy. Today, around 70% of devices used in Landmark Retail stores are employee personal devices, with a 50/50 split of Android and iOS devices. Having the ability to support many different devices, with many being BYOD, means Landmark can keep hardware costs down but employee efficiency high.

Juan added: “One of the things I love about Scandit is that they are partners and not just vendors. They took the time to visit our stores and understand the workflows fully. It meant they could propose new, innovative, yet realistic ways for us to be more efficient across our business. The integration was seamless as our engineers worked closely with Scandit to discuss the best ways to do it. With an agreed approach, the integration was fast.”

Results

Today, the Landmark Retail app is used by around 25,000 employees to manage all store tasks, including:

• Customer experience – expert clienteling and flexible checkout with mPOS.
• Store operations – accurate goods receiving and inventory management.
• Omnichannel – efficient order fulfillment and seamless click-and-collect processes.

Juan commented on the impact on store operations: “Feedback from our employees has been very positive. They find the Scandit-powered smartphone app very easy to use, which saves time and makes working tasks super efficient. And it’s proving to be a game changer for quickly onboarding new, often inexperienced employees due to their familiarity with their device.”

Because Scandit can support many different devices (12,000 across Landmark Retail), employees can use their own familiar smartphones. This helps with productivity because employees can use a device they love, and it’s also great for the bottom line as hardware costs are lower.

Happy employees and enhanced customer experiences

The Scandit solution also plays an important role in enhancing customer experiences. For example, store associates can now easily respond to customer queries like stock availability simply by retrieving product information on their smartphones. With mPOS powered by Scandit, it provides greater convenience and helps meet customers’ differing needs across lower – and higher-volume Landmark Retail brands.

Through enhanced in-store engagement and improved omnichannel services, Landmark Retail has seen an increase in multi-channel sales and found that omnichannel customers spend more than those who use a single channel.

Looking to the future, Landmark Retail plans to make further efficiencies when managing inventory and processing omnichannel orders. This includes a pilot of Scandit MatrixScan Count, which enables employees to scan and count multiple barcodes simultaneously when receiving goods and counting stock to speed up these time-consuming tasks.

The retailer also believes that Scandit’s augmented reality developments could help to increase customer experiences, especially across its fashion and homeware brands. Evaluating what AR can do in terms of product information and customer interaction is something they will explore in the future.