From Digital Price Tags to Store Floor Automation - A Unified Commerce Mandate

Digital price tags have been in place for decades, mainly to automate the store pricing process, shift labor and eliminate the need for printed labels. Today, the platform they operate on needs to enable tasks for store associates and interact with customer loyalty applications with low latency, speed, performance and predictability. This is all part of a broader unified commerce strategy that comprehends store floor automation.

Let’s look at a real-life example of one of our smaller hypermarkets and how they evolved from a simple digital price tag solution to a need for store floor automation. This case study, albeit not unique, is repeating itself across the entire retail industry.

Past Era

In the past, digitally pushing price weekly, or even monthly in batch cycles by night to an electronic shelf label (ESL) required little power and capacity. This type of capability has been around for decades from a multitude of providers. Radio frequency platforms traded off speed, capacity, interference and battery consumption while experimenting across a range of channels.

Pricer stood alone utilizing a diffused light technology platform and continued to steadily improve speed, capacity, fractionally lower impact on battery power with no interference from, or on, other store technologies. This resulted in a highly predictable platform to deploy for retailers.

Even with the evolution of shelf edge technology which added color, more information, and things like near field communication (NFC) to interact with smartphones, the capacity requirements increased slightly but were still fairly minimal.   

Retailers during this era would mainly select systems based on the lowest total cost of ownership and benefitted from automating the pricing process, freeing up some labor and eliminating the need to print paper labels.

Evolution Era

After this early phase, retailers realized that promotions and price changes were no longer constrained by manual intervention. The velocity increased and began to evolve to real time during the day. The ability to begin thinking about unifying pricing strategies across channels began to crystalize. Dynamic pricing tactics and more sophisticated price optimization systems enabled by AI began to drive the velocity of change at the shelf even further. The additional demand placed on the digital electronic shelf labels by the hypermarket needed to keep up with the stream of new and more frequent information sent to the shelf edge. Technology becoming a constraint was not an option. The physical store began to mirror the online commerce experience.

The hypermarket began to take advantage of automatic geopositioning and flash technology. Customers, and store associates alike, began finding products based on the system’s ability to locate the electronic shelf label (now associated with a product location) which was integrated into customer loyalty as well as store associate task-oriented applications. The operational efficiencies and increases in customer loyalty began to really gain momentum.

Retailers, during this phase began to stress test the capabilities of the system to ensure it was able to keep up with their desired business objectives. Evaluation of the digital shelf systems was no longer based simply on cost. Speed, responsiveness, low latency, capacity and power longevity was added to selection criteria.  

Current Era

Then along came significant upticks in BOPIS - buy online pick up in store, at the curb, or deliver to home and the local hypermarket is now an integral part of the supply chain. Moving more product through the physical store now requires replenishment on a more frequent basis. Newly hired less experienced personnel, to accommodate these tasks, were quickly added. This began to add operational expense in order to satisfy customers but was not always margin friendly.

Add the COVID 19 pandemic on top of this trend, and the need to automate for unified commerce, increases exponentially. (See COVID 19 impact survey on retailers with & without electronic shelf labels)

Capacity, speed, and sub second response with power to spare quickly became table stakes for a viable store floor automation system. BOPIS orders, to be picked, reached into the millions on an annual basis as did the number of products needing replenishment. Flash technology combined with geolocationing to help pickers and associates replenish shelves, provided for the much needed efficiencies in order to preserve margin and satisfy customers waiting in cars at the curb.

AI driven camera technology operating in unison with electronic shelf labels to identify out of stock items, facing errors and shelf space optimization offered further opportunities for store associate task management broadening the circle of store floor automation.

Because Pricer utilizes a bi-direction diffused infrared light platform, this tried and true system far surpassed radio frequency platforms that, to this day, are limited to digital price tag solutions.

Once the velocity of pricing and promotions increases screen updates along with the introduction of flash technology, a radio frequency (RF) platform begins to experience latency simply not suitable for automation. This also causes a significant depletion of battery power resulting in the need for unnecessary battery upgrades interrupting operations and increasing cost of ownership. Proper stress testing can easily identify these shortfalls well before a decision is made to roll out beyond a proof of concept. Essentially and with limitation, these RF platforms meet the expectation of 3-4 year digital price tag.

Unified Commerce Mandate

The era of true unified commerce requires floor automation beyond a basic digital price tag to gain operational efficiencies as well as build customer loyalty at a time of unprecedented change in retail. Pricer's 15 year battery supply provides plenty of excess power. Not only to accommodate additional store floor automation use cases, but also upcoming improvements to ESL technology which, yet presumably again, will require additional power and capacity.