Mobico – iStart keeping business informed on technology

Making BYOD a success in retail

Jennene Kelly — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 20:10:27 +0000

The notion of a marketing and sales strategy based on in-store BYOD seems to be an exciting one for bricks and mortar retailers. It relies on shoppers using the store-provided app on their own mobile device to access product information, prices and offers, but the real question is whether they will be encouraged to spend and will they come back?

If shoppers are looking at their phones and not your shelves, are you in trouble? Retailers work hard and spend millions to create captivating and enjoyable in-store experiences for shoppers. Rent, fittings, stock, staff, lighting, displays and advertising. So why would they turn expensive bricks and mortar into e-tail? Why spend big bucks getting shoppers instore, only to direct their eyes to the mobile devices in their hands and away from your merchandise and staff?

If they’re struggling, they’re not buying
From a shop assistant’s perspective, there is a potentially new conversation that springs from the simple question “Can I help you?” When they see someone cursing their smartphone in an aisle these days, they ask themselves, “Are they having a text fight with their partner? Has their shopping-list just crashed or has their battery run out? Have they found a cheaper price somewhere else? Has their smartphone dropped off the store network and won’t reconnect? Why are they taking so long to buy something?”

Is BYOD a good customer journey?
So, with that in mind, does BYOD offer a good customer journey? Is it fast, reliable and consistent? And as most shoppers only have two arms, is it ergonomic? How do you easily carry more than one item while using a smartphone? What if you drop it, or drop your smartphone? How well does a smartphone scan? During BYOD trials in Europe and America, retailers have found some shoppers persevere and some give up. Like self-checkout, BYOD works for some shoppers, some of the time.

As with any customer journey, the better the experience, the more people want it. But the reverse also applies.

What is the future for BYOD in retail?
There are many aspects around the usability and uptake of BYOD that retailers and shoppers will work through over the next few years. In Europe and America some of the larger retailers have already started. The conceptual answer is simple, “the use of BYOD in store is about continuing a dialogue with customers”. The shopper’s device has an app.

The store detects when they arrive and the store system provides reminders and recommendations supported by offers and information. Store assistants also have a device, so that they can add to the interaction and experience, be part of the dialogue and provide additional assistance including fetching, packing, wrapping and payment.

Noticeably, what is missing is the advice. In the BYOD scenario, the assumption is that mostly the shopper is informing themselves while being guided by the store’s customer-relationship-come-customer-dialogue application.

The assistant is there to close and fulfil the transaction. BYOD shifts the focus (and training) of the retail assistant from expertise to enablement. The conundrum for consumers and retailers is whether this method of retail will sustain the levels of investment and margin that are required to retain the in-store experiences shoppers enjoy today.

Furthermore, how many of us want to shop this way? Maybe we just want to walk in and quickly get what we came for, then leave. After all, with traffic the way that it is, who has time to muck around on their smartphone in-store anyway? But don’t despair if you just prefer to shop and go. Now that retailers know shoppers are tech savvy, they can provide proven in-store technologies such as price checkers and self scan systems that help customers shop better and faster.

Will BYOD change the way we shop Downunder?
BYOD will change the way we shop. We are seeing it already at Mobico where we are working with retailers on these types of projects right now. In 2013 you will see more BYOD concepts tested in store. In addition to this, more staff are taking the initiative of using their own devices in-store to help customers. And shoppers are increasingly using third-party price checking and consumer advice apps while in-store. For the retailers that provide them, price checkers and self scan systems are proven to increase sales and loyalty by 10 to 20 percent, so you may well see a resurgence of these. One thing is for sure, retailers are constantly coming up with clever ways to help us spend more of our time and money with them!

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Mobico
W: www.mobico.biz
E: info@mobico.biz
T: +64 9 303 0686

This article was supplied to iStart by Mobico. Aldas Palubinskas is Managing Director of Mobico. For 10 years Mobico has been Motorola’s leading ANZ retail solutions partner.

The post Making BYOD a success in retail appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

‘Please sir, can I have some more productivity…?’

Jennene Kelly — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:42:27 +0000

Do you sometimes wish your people were more like machines, robots, worker bees or soldier ants? Why do people have to have feelings, good days, bad days, pride and goals? How come there are still so many jobs that require staff to do menial and highly repetitive tasks. For example, moving goods, or recording details about tasks.

Every day, in New Zealand, millions of these repetitive tasks are performed. This is the backbone of modern life. But it is often dreary and boringly repetitive work.

Could you do it, day after day, year after year? Thankfully, life is probably not a Dickens novel for you or I, but it is staggering how many Victorian era paper-based practices remain in the modern workplace.

We can all talk about how government should improve productivity, but how many of us have really improved productivity within our own workplaces?

Is it up to you to change this? Will jobs continue to be lost as larger and/or offshore companies swallow up NZ companies, because they fail to invest in technology to streamline necessary but error-prone menial repetitive tasks? What can you do?

Changing business processes is certainly hard. It can feel like trying to get out of a moving car because there is so much momentum. But it need not be like this. Here are three simple steps to improving productivity. These are based on how the leading businesses we work with and the “agents of change” that work within them do it. It’s a simple, proven and potent approach.

1. Find it
2. Prove it
3. Do it

1. FIND IT
If you’ve read previous features or case studies, you may recall Mobico specialises in handheld mobile computers. The majority of the 20,000 or so units they look after throughout NZ are doing the most boring jobs in the country. You might say:

“What they do isn’t innovative, it’s repetitive”.

So, what are the most repetitive tasks in your organisation?

• If you are a service company, it’s scheduling jobs, recording time and replacing parts

• If you are a wholesaler or retailer, it is replacing stock

• If you are in freight or warehousing, it is moving stock

• If you are a hospital, it will be ordering/replacing supplies, recording details and cleaning

• If you are a council, it will probably be maintenance and inspections

• If you are a hotelier, cleaning rooms and restocking the mini-bar

Large parts of your organisation’s people and capital are committed to similar tasks every day.

They are repetitive, but always need to be done on time, with accuracy and care. Every day, year after year.

FORM YOUR HYPOTHESIS:
“We can reduce shipping errors by 90%”
“We can reduce stocktake time from 24 hours to 4 hours”
“We can make two additional customer visits per person, per day”
“We can reduce stock losses by 50%”
“We can reduce the time to complete the task by 20%”
“We can reduce inventory by 15%”

Once you have agreed on a theoretical target, work through what the business benefit is. Be specific. Productivity gains are typically evolutionary, not revolutionary in size and value. If your hypothesis is credible, you will be able to theorise repeatable benefits, but typically they may be “small”.

Such benefits frequently range from $20 to $50 per task worker, per day. While costs to achieve them are around $10 per day. People can often lose heart at this stage, feeling that it will take a lot of work and cost to achieve what on the face of it looks to be quite a small gain.

Using a handheld mobile computer improves the quality and consistency of these tasks. These reduce errors, eliminate double-handling (ie. the re-keying of data) and speed up service. But, perhaps most importantly, they take some of the drudgery away from the tasks.

However, $20 to $50 is actually a very large gain. Did you know $30 per person, per day easily extrapolates to the equivalent of $200,000 per year in extra sales. Consider this: average net earnings are often less than 5% of revenue and, in most cases, the benefits proposed can be viewed as flowing directly to the bottom line, given they are normally a direct cost of sale or operating cost reductions. So, $30 divided by 5% = $600 per day x 365 days, or 250, depending on your company.

So, do the maths. Also take into account the compounding effect. However, you look at it there will be a good return. So, keep believing in it.

2. PROVE IT
With a clear hypothesis, like any scientist, you will need to prove it. Think about the processes around this task. But not too many of them. The secret to a successful mobility project is to keep the scope tight and the concept simple.

This can also be said about many projects, but specifically with mobility the tasks being improved on are repetitive.

Start with the most simple repetitive task. You can always add other tasks later. Also keep the error handling process simple and ideally not on the mobile computer. For example, when doing a stocktake, if the item you’ve just scanned isn’t recognised, just take it to the stocktake supervisor.

Don’t design your stocktake application to add the item as this will complicate the process and potentially introduce data integrity issues.

Once you have a tight scope and functional specification, it is then very easy and cheap to build a prototype/proof-of-concept mobile application and run it on borrowed or rented equipment. Once you have this, you can then work through your new improved process recording the results and findings. Then record the same process done the current way and estimate the savings.

EXAMPLES:
“We ran the proof of concept order picking system for 2 weeks. We found orders took on average 8 minutes less to pick and every order was 100% accurate. Without the order picking system 5 out of every 100 orders had issues.

Based on 25 orders per day per person, we estimate the system will save 100 minutes per day in picking, plus at least 20 minutes per day sorting out incorrectly picked orders. This improves our performance by 2 hours x $20 per hour = $40 per day”.

“Our stocktake used to take 6 people 4 hours for 4 nights.

That’s 96 hours. What’s more the stock changed as we opened during the day. We put in the stocktake system, it now takes 4 people 4 hours. That’s a saving of 80 hours and we get it done all in one night, so the stock is accurate.

The time saving alone is worth $1,200 each stock take”.

“The technician saves on average 8 minutes per job. They do 7 jobs per day. Saving 4 minutes 7 times per day means we save 56 minutes per day, which allows us to squeeze in an extra job most days, which generates an average of $70 per day extra”.

3. DO IT
Great. You’ve found out how to save some money, or make some more. Is this the moment of truth? Is $30 per day, per worker enough benefit to get the project approved? It adds up to a lot extra on the bottom line at the end of the year – or does it? What is your threshold?

Some businesses will do it for $10 and some will easily get $100 or more. However, many businesses seem to feel that $30+ per day, per task worker is not enough of a benefit to pursue. Did you know most mobility projects have an ROI of less than 12 months, but they take on average 4 years to get the go ahead. There’s always plenty of excuses:

EXCUSES EXCUSES:
“We can’t reduce head count, so it isn’t a real saving”
“We just need to try harder and reduce errors”
“Everyone does it the way we do, so why should we change?”
“It’s not in this year’s budget”
“If we are going to do that, we also need to do this and this and this”

These are the same reasons that government departments find it hard to change. Is your business the same? Have modern business management practices paralysed common sense decision making?

Improved productivity is not a destination, it is a journey.

Make some decisions, follow in the steps of others and enjoy the benefits of their learning.

Start focused and expand the scope over time.

Provide your workforce with tools that improve the menial, task-based jobs, that even make them fun.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Mobico
W: www.mobico.biz
E: info@mobico.biz
T: +64 9 303 0686

Mobico is NZ’s largest specialist handheld mobile-computer and wireless-network provider. It has installed – and supports – over 700 wireless networks across NZ, operating 20,000 handheld mobile-computers.

The post ‘Please sir, can I have some more productivity…?’ appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.