Boost Store Management Efficiency with Scandit

Youngpoong Bookstore (YP Books) opened in 1992 with Korea’s largest Jonggak Jongno branch, located in the Youngpoong Building located in Jonggak, Seoul. As Korea’s leading bookstore, it has 44 stores nationwide and it provides customers with a diverse, comfortable cultural space.

YP Books boasts a broad range of books and educational materials, spanning multiple genres. Each store must efficiently manage the 100+ types of new books they receive daily, as well as their designated libraries. 

YP Books wanted to improve customer satisfaction by quickly checking the prices of items that don’t have price tags, such as stationery and music albums. However, the open-source based barcode scanner that was previously used did not enable employees to work efficiently. In fact, both customers and employees often found scanning barcodes was slow or inaccurate.

Challenge

Work at a bookstore begins with ‘display.’ When books are delivered to the stores nationwide, employees first scan the barcode and match it to the location on a specific bookshelf. This involves registering the physical location of inventory in the back office system. It was also a basic task to avoid any confusion and helped to streamline finding a specific book for a customer or inspecting and shipping it.

The Need to Mobilize Processes

The problem, however, was the location of the barcode scanning desk within the store. The scanner was connected to the PC that was ‘fixed’ in a specific location within the large store. Employees always had to return to the barcode scanning desk to perform the scanning involved in the entry/exit and inspection process. 

This meant that employees scanned books, had to remember the location of the bookshelf, and then return the book to display it. Approximately 50 to 100 types of new books are received each day, so employees repeated the process of scanning each book every time, identifying the location of the bookshelf, moving it, and putting it on display. 

When replicated across all 44 stores, this process was naturally causing unnecessary movement and steps for employees and inefficiency for YP Books.

Wasted Time and Frustrated Customers

Additionally, there were difficulties in the premium and stationery sales space, another business area within Youngpoong Bookstore. 

There are many music albums and various stationery products distributed domestically, where the prices are not displayed on the products. As a result, customers needed to ask store employees about the price of the product they wanted to purchase.  To answer the question, the employee must check the price using the fixed barcode reader and then return to respond to the customer. 

As a result, a lot of time was wasted, and when customers could not find store staff, they sometimes walked away without purchasing the products. YP Books needed to more efficiently respond to inquiries from shoppers to help increase customer loyalty and boost sales.

Needing a software-based mobile scanning solution to tackle these requirements, they engaged with Scandit.

Solution

To solve these challenges, YP Books purchased the Samsung Galaxy A series smartphones and integrated the Scandit Barcode Scanner SDK into the employee applications running on the devices.

YP Books distributed these Samsung smartphones to employees, who can now perform different operational and scanning tasks anytime, and anywhere, within the store.

As a result, YP Books employees are able to process location registration tasks without having to move from the warehouse to the scanning workstation. Additionally, the scanning needed to display items on bookshelves is now handled without the inconvenience of having to move to the fixed workstation equipped with the barcode scanner.

“This seemingly small change of being able to scan barcodes through smartphones has reduced the travel time to and from the fixed workstation for our employees. It is now possible to work and scan anywhere with your smartphone, so restrictions on where you work have disappeared.”

Jaehoon Choi, Store staff of YP Books Yeouido IFC branch

Youngpoong Bookstore first installed a ‘stationery product price search station’ using the Scandit barcode scanning engine at its Yeouido and Gimpo branches. The first use of the Scandit solution was to improve the efficiency of bookstore employees’ check-in and check-out work. This price search platform aims to increase efficiency from a customer-facing perspective.

This product price search station uses Scandit’s barcode scanning solution via a tablet PC. This price search has resulted in reducing the man-hours of YP Books store staff responding to customers, saving employees from needing to handle 100 to 150 cases per day. This has allowed employees to focus more on their main tasks.

Results

Since introducing smartphones powered by Scandit Smart Data Capture, the productivity of YP Books’ employees responsible for managing bookstore stock and inventory has increased by 20% to 30% on average, and by more than 40% depending on the task. 

YP Books is expanding this solution beyond storage and delivery management to also include customer engagement activities within the bookstore.

In addition, the accuracy and speed of barcode scanning has increased significantly compared to the legacy solution. 

Superior scanning performance

Employees used to have to carefully line up straight to a specific line or code to be able to scan. Now with Scandit, scanning performance simply happens without any problems, no matter how awkward the angle is. 

In fact, store associates said that the Scandit barcode scanning was so fast that they could not keep up with the speed, so a ‘delay’ function was added on purpose.

“The incumbent back office system was built using SAP and training employees on a series of tasks, such as how to log in, scan the screen with a barcode or input information, was time-consuming. It was not familiar to most employees. But now with Scandit-powered smart devices, anyone, even a new employee, can start working after just 30 minutes of training. Store managers especially highly value this aspect, and I believe this also improves productivity.”

Kyung Hwan, Kim CEO of YP Books

In the case of price search using tablets, staff typically respond to between 100 to 150 customer price requests per day. Employees can now deal with each customer query within 2 minutes.  In essence, saving up to 300 minutes per day. As a result, store associates can now focus on more valuable tasks.

“In addition, the insights we gain from customers scanning items in store has a lot of implications for us. With this insight, we will be able to better understand customer interests to consider and utilize ways to strengthen store display of specific categories or products.”

Kyung Hwan, Kim CEO of YP Books