Why retailers’ technologies should be connected from the product source to the store

But there’s more to retail than what happens on the sales floor. What happens before products arrive is just as important for retailers who are working to improve operations and experiences.

Hiding in plain sight

In retail, everything is intertwined. While it can be tempting to believe that internal issues don’t affect customers, the reality is that each customer’s experience is the sum of its different parts. Small delays, miscommunications and discrepancies before merchandise goes onto the sales floor all contribute to:

Customer journeys. In today’s highly connected, omnichannel-driven environment, inventory accuracy is the key to meeting customers’ needs. With the consistent popularity of self-checkouts, online pickup and other customer-directed touchpoints, shoppers are closer to backend operations than they’ve ever been before.

Even customers who do not place orders ahead of time often rely on online inventory counts to determine where and when they shop. Delivery visibility from the manufacturer to the receiving point can help retailers keep their online inventory records up-to-date, allowing shoppers to find the right product at the right place and at the right time, thereby reducing friction and preserving loyalty.

Labor spending and allocation. The more unknowns there are in a retail setting, the less productive employees will be. Without insight into upstream operations, sales associates spend more time looking for products, manually counting merchandise and searching for answers — and less time interacting with customers in meaningful ways.

Source-tagging for electronic article surveillance mitigates the need to hand count and manually tag items, which allows sales associates to focus on helping shoppers while feeling confident that merchandise is secure and compliant. Additionally, source tagging for radio frequency identification not only adds that layer of security, but it also provides visibility throughout the supply chain.

Loss prevention efforts. Knowing what’s coming into the store is the only way to know what’s leaving it. Without accurate, real-time data from manufacturers and suppliers, retailers are unable to assess drivers of loss with confidence. Were items stolen, or did they break in transit? Maybe they never arrived in the first place? Sometimes it’s impossible to say, which means retailers are unable to develop the targeted prevention tactics necessary to combat total retail loss.

Retail analytics systems that don’t take upstream data into account are missing pieces of the puzzle — and the predictive insights and suggestions they identify can lack critical information. By extending visibility to the point of manufacturing, retailers get a better sense of upstream factors that contribute to losses so they can more accurately assess how their processes impact their performance.

Same tools, different strategy

To mature data-driven decision-making practices and ensure comprehensive visibility, retailers will need to find ways to extend their data collection and management systems beyond their backrooms and directly to the source. Today’s technology can help retailers expand their analytics to cover never-before-monitored elements of their operations.

Even better, the systems retailers already rely on form the foundation of this extended insight:

• RFID labels and sensors — which are commonly used to achieve item-level inventory visibility within retail locations — can do the same outside a store’s four walls.
• Integrated data analytics platforms centralize and process cross-enterprise data to provide predictive insights and guide retailers toward opportunities to address pain points.

By applying RFID tags at the point of manufacturing rather than upon delivery, retailers can get the same level of insight into what happens before inventory arrives at their doors as they have within their store locations. Adding electronic article surveillance hardware to source-tagging programs can help retailers feel confident that merchandise arrives protected, brand-compliant and ready for the sales floor. This data further contextualizes in-store analytics to ensure that backend challenges aren’t the root cause of friction, waste or lost sales, while freeing up employees’ time, eliminating the need for manual tagging and hand counts.

Many retailers have already started this journey, and it has driven compelling results. One retailer that pursued source-to-store visibility into inventory reported reduced stockouts by 87% within the first two years of implementation. The brand also saw enhanced inventory accuracy (+64%), checkout efficiency, omnichannel operations and shopper behavior insights.

Collaborations with retail technology leaders can help clear the path for retailers who are unsure how to begin. Finding a partner that can offer not only the software and hardware necessary to streamline implementation but also support services and established source-tagging models to help retailers build programs is critical to success. Partners who offer these supports help retailers ensure they’re deriving the full value of their technology investments, guiding teams toward solutions that help to future-proof the business.

Turning obstacles into opportunities

In times of necessary change, there are also opportunities for those willing to see them as such — and retailers have an exceptional track record of seizing the moment. Now, with more advanced technologies at their disposal, retailers have another opportunity to transform, both in their stores and beyond them. Those who expand the scope of their connected systems to the source will be able to further enhance their performance from source to store.

Sponsored by Sensormatic Solutions