Large Retail Group Unlocks 50% Faster Price Verification With Scandit

An innovative retail group, who operate shopping malls, retail and leisure businesses, and more in 30+ countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, is on a mission to digitally transform. It aims to become the leading omnichannel player in the region by optimizing store operations and enhancing customer satisfaction.

The retail group includes the regional rights to a large supermarket chain. This means operating 400+ stores and multiple online offerings across 15+ countries, with 40,000+ workers serving 700,000 people daily. The retail group focuses on offering the widest range of quality products and value for money to meet the needs of this diverse customer base.

A key pillar in its aim to deliver cutting-edge omnichannel digital solutions was to empower store associates with smart devices and a mobile app powered by Scandit. A particular focus was on innovating its price and promotion label verification processes, a time and resource intensive task where any errors could lead to costly compliance fines.

Our associates use the mobile app and Scandit’s advanced capabilities on their smartphones to complete critical tasks affecting shopping experiences – like shelf management and price and promotion label verification – with greater speed, ease and accuracy. Customers are happier, employees are more satisfied and the productivity gains from smart data capture are significant.

Digital Transformation Lead, Retail Group, Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia.

Challenge

In deploying a market-leading omnichannel digital solution across its grocery stores, the retail group aimed to tackle a number of issues impacting the business, its customers and its employees. These included:

• Lowering the cost to serve and technology total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Improving on-shelf product availability
• Increasing pricing accuracy and compliance
• Enhancing customer assistance in-store
• Digitalizing existing manual or time-intensive processes
• Delivering rich and fulfilling customer experiences with flexible solutions to introduce new offerings

To address these challenges, simplify store operations and help employees at all levels (including managers, IT, supervisors, associates, and more) with their daily tasks, the retail group decided to develop a mobile application.

It consolidated various devices (including handheld computers and fixed computers), instead leveraging employees’ personal smartphones.  Employees’ smart devices, under a bring your own strategy, needed to provide a platform for various technology enablers, including data capture, communications tools, task management, real-time information, and access to training materials.

By leveraging technology in this way, the retail group is able to use the data generated to help increase revenue, reduce costs and better understand customers to boost loyalty.

High performance scanning was a critical need

One must-have capability for the new mobile app was scanning. Employees scan hundreds of times per day. It is essential for the smooth running of store and omnichannel operations.

The retail group wanted to ensure high performance data capture for product barcodes, shelf labels and more. It aimed to deploy smart data capture software into the mobile app to deliver a consistent user experience to scan with speed, reliability and accuracy, in any real-world conditions encountered in the various store environments.

In order to scale quickly, the retail group adopted a bring your own device (BYOD) model, so scanning also had to work optimally with all the smart device models.

But beyond ensuring great core scanning performance, it wanted to identify smarter ways to digitize existing workflows to drastically improve the associate experience and productivity.

Three processes were identified as ripe for innovation.

Price and promotion label execution

This process involved constantly scanning and auditing price labels on shelves to check accuracy and, if needed, correcting the incorrect prices and promotions.

It was a very manual and labor-intensive process, needing to scan thousands of products with handheld computer devices, manually inputting prices into systems, then only identifying discrepancies when the report was printed. This ate up a lot of associate time, while errors could lead to compliance fines.

To be able to proactively respond to price sensitive customers and adapt to regulation quickly, a new, smarter process was required.

Product scanning for accurate backend data

Daily operational tasks such as scanning for stock visibility, to publish/unpublish products, check out of stock products, and to register expiry dates had to be reliable to ensure greater accuracy of information in the systems.

This helps track key success metrics like on-shelf availability, sales performance, and planogram compliance.

Customer assistance and product information lookup

Today’s customers are typically empowered with a lot of information.  The retail group wanted to ensure its employees were also empowered, enabling them to quickly, accurately, and confidently answer customer questions on the spot and thereby deliver exceptional, connected experiences.

Solution

After investigating and testing various scanning options, the retail group determined that Scandit Smart Data Capture offered the performance, flexibility and innovative capabilities it needed.

It integrated the Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK and MatrixScan AR into the new price compliance solution, leveraging the employee mobile app to support various data capture tasks via camera-enabled smart devices provided to employees.

The Scandit solution includes:

Top performance smart data capture

Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK ensures best-in-class scanning on any camera-enabled smart device for any scanning workflow. Scanning is fast, accurate and reliable, even in the toughest conditions, at angles, over distance or where barcodes are damaged or obscured by glare/shadow.

Superior shelf management

Employees now use smartphones to scan shelf labels for automated price checks. Scandit enables displayed prices to be verified against the product catalog.

Once audit results are input into the retailer’s system, it will automatically print the correct labels, actioning the updates via associates to ensure pricing accuracy and compliance.

This includes capturing both barcodes and text at the same time, as well as the ability to scan multiple labels simultaneously and show real-time information via augmented reality (AR) overlays.

AR for superior employee experiences

By combining barcode scanning with AR for everyday tasks, store associates or managers can now scan products to see real-time information (pricing, stock availability etc) on the device screen in AR overlays via MatrixScan AR.

Employees benefit from processes now being mobilized. For example, previously to check stock information employees would need to go to the office, log in to the computer, the stock information tool and print out the information. Now it’s all handled through an intuitive mobile app and a simple scan.

The Scandit Smart Data Capture solution was deployed in a phased approach for different workflows across multiple countries and stores.

Scandit acted as a trusted technology partner to the retail group, ensuring smooth integration processes and working through challenges such as ensuring different countries’ labeling formats could be effectively captured during PPLE processes (varying layouts, formats, languages etc).

Currently the Scandit-powered app is live in 15 countries and used by up to 10,000 employees, handling over 13 million scans in 2023.

Results

Since deploying Scandit into the employee-facing application, the retail group has unlocked a range of measurable benefits across its grocery store operations.

Running across 250 stores in eight countries, the new mobile price checking process powered by Scandit has helped to drastically improve both the store associate’s productivity and user experience.

• 50% time saving vs previous price check and verification method.
• Significant increase in the volume of items audited due to faster processes. More items audited means more accuracy in data.
• Price inaccuracy is no longer listed as a detractor on the net promoter score (NPS) report for stores.
• Fines for price inaccuracy reduced by 80% YOY.

In certain countries it operates in, if there is a price discrepancy, then by law the customer can file a complaint which can cost them financial penalties equivalent to around ten thousand dollars per claim.

The group was seeing at least one claim per store per month. Since deploying Scandit, these claims went down to zero.

More scans, more accurate data, more productivity

The Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK and MatrixScan AR is also used by employees across 15 countries for scanning products during other daily operations and customer assistance tasks.  The results have been impressive.

• 30% productivity gain on scanning tasks, reducing time to complete tasks and freeing up employees to engage with customers more.
• 20% improvement in on-shelf availability
• Reduction in incomplete order rate (when an item is unavailable for an ecommerce order) from 19% to 7%.
• Associates can give customers real time, accurate information for pricing, stock availability, delivery dates and more on the spot.
• Managers have access to sales performance by scanning any item, from any store.
• Improved overall visibility of the shelf management planograms.

The combination of high performance data capture, advanced multi-scanning and AR capabilities delivered by Scandit is one of the key technology enablers for the retail group.

“Scandit has played a role in helping our employees perform better and be happier in their jobs, removing tedious tasks, and to reinvest that time in helping customers.”

Digital Transformation Lead, Retail Group, Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia.

The innovative retail group now plans to continue to add new and richer experiences and offerings for its customers, supported by the power and flexibility of smart data capture technology, to further cement their position as the leading omnichannel player in the region.