Retailers focus on data and mobility

Data transfer and the many applications being developed to harness enabling technologies will be high on the agenda for retailers in the coming months.

Delegates to Euroshop, Europe's largest retail industry conference held in Düsseldorf this week, were yesterday [Monday] told to focus on electronic data interchange (EDI), radio frequency identification (RFID) and mobile payments to capitalise on future technology trends.

Jörg Pretzel, managing director of the supply chain data standards body, GS1 in Germany said, although technologies for automating the transfer of data throughout the supply chain had been around for many years, retailers still only use EDI systems with a third of their suppliers.

"When you consider EDI has been around for 15 years or more, it is crazy that retailers only use it for communicating with a small proportion of their suppliers," he said.

But he added that the new frontier when it comes to data exchange would be in customer-facing channels, where retailers investing in supply chain applications of barcodes or RFID tags could extend their investment to offer customers product information or special offers, on the fly.

"Communication between us, as retailers and consumers will, in future happen more and more at store level, supported by technological means," said Pretzel. "RFID and barcodes will not just be seen as an IT cost centre, but the means to make positive contribution to sales, margin and customer loyalty."

Manfred Mueller, head of Visa Europe in Germany took up the GS1 cause of extending supply chain data exchange technologies into more customer-facing channels with a presentation that highlighted the card acquirer's mobile payment work.

"Near-field communications [NFC] is a low cost, internationally standard technology that, rather like RFID, have the ability to extend the number of services the retail industry can offer consumers," said Mueller.

Like RFID, he said the use of NFC or 'contactless' technology' in devices, like the Barclaycard's Transport for London Oyster card trial Visa facilitated last summer, relies on an ecosystem of partners that Visa Europe has been building, to include mobile operators, service providers, handset manufacturers, acquiring banks and merchants.

"Visa is not in the game of offering mobile services, so we must rely on partners and their expertise to capitalise on the mobile payments' opportunity," he said. "With 80 per cent of payments still made in cash, m-payments have the potential to replace low-value transactions with a more convenient and fast alternative."

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