Today’s world is all about making everyday processes easier, faster, and more effective. It’s true whether you’re ordering food, hiring a taxi, or looking over your business processes to understand where the problems are. Helmes and telecommunication company Telia Finland, together with Turck Vilant Systems, recently took a process used in big warehouses and applied it to retail.
Imagine doing a retail store stocktaking within a couple of minutes.
If you are selling thousands of goods in your store and you have tens or hundreds of shops, then you are familiar with a painful operation that you must go through again and again – taking stock of the products in your inventory. Oh, how your workers hate going through all the items in the shop one by one. You must close the shop for many hours, and if you have various shops, then it can add up to days in lost sales. Or, you do your stocktaking at night and you must pay your workers compensation. Do people like to work at night? Usually not. Nobody likes stocktaking, but it must be done.
Retail Store Stocktaking in Minutes
Do it quickly and remotely
Telia Finland, Helmes, and Turck Vilant Systems put their heads and knowledge together and came up with a solution that makes this headache disappear. We adapted RFID (radio-frequency identification) stickers and a remote scanner that can register the items at a distance. It means you just have to move around the shop with a scanner in your hand, pointing it towards your goods, and it automatically registers them.
Let’s say you have 500 items on a shelf. Today you would need to take them, find a barcode, and register these items. An RFID remote scanner can read the stickers even when they are not facing the scanner. Also, if one product is behind another, it registers them both anyway. The scanner can be adjusted to read products from roughly 10 meters. It is for you to choose how sensitive the scanner is.
With a walk through your store, the whole store stocktaking can be done in minutes. You don’t need to close the shop or work at night anymore. Imagine the money that you gain or save; your workers will thank you as well.
The other painful issue
There’s another inefficiency present in any retail store – the receipt of the goods. Every day at least one box of goods comes to a store and the items need to be registered. They cannot be sold without that procedure.
Often this registration takes place during the hours when the shop is open when you are not servicing clients. Mistakes can be made, and it can be a constant logistical issue to find out where the error took place.
The solution that Telia Finland, Helmes, and Turck Vilant developed deals with this issue as well.
When you get a box full of products, you can register all of them within seconds.
There’s no need to find the barcodes as the RFID stickers can be read remotely. Your workers are happy, because their job is easier, and they can focus on the customers. There are no more mistakes that come from multitasking, and the products can go on sale much faster.
The whole chain covered
If you also have the same kind of system in your warehouse, then you have the whole cycle of a product covered. You always know exactly what items you have in your warehouse and in your shops.
This new solution changes the retail sector. You have fewer logistical mistakes and accounting errors, together with an enormous amount of time and energy saved. And this solution can be used on all products, not just technical gadgets like Telia sells. Helmes tested the RFID with different objects, even ones with liquids involved. It seems like barcodes could be history soon.
READ ALSO: How New Software can Make a Self-Checkout Blazingly Fast!
The solution is technically versatile and packed with interesting features. We believe it is only the start of Point of Sale innovations. If you are interested in its fascinating technical functions and possibilities, let us know. We are more than happy to share solution highlights with you. Let’s have a Skype call!
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