Transform retail operations with Zebra’s retail technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for improving inventory management and empowering teams.
Streamline operations with Zebra’s grocery technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for improving retail shelf management, ordering and replenishment.
Enhance e-commerce operations with Zebra’s real-time inventory and automated workflows. Ensure accurate fulfilment, efficient returns, and seamless service.
Zebra’s technology solutions for department stores and speciality stores, feature hardware and software for retail management and workforce management.
Zebra’s omnichannel fulfilment technology solutions, feature hardware and software for timely order processing across channels and unified customer experience.
Zebra’s retail inventory management solutions, feature hardware, software and supplies for optimising inventory management and demand forecasting.
Enhance transactions with Zebra’s POS technology solutions, featuring hardware, software and supplies for optimising the checkout experience.
Zebra’s customer experience technology solutions, feature hardware and software for delivering personalised retail experiences and self-service capabilities.
Safeguard profits with Zebra’s retail loss prevention technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for enhancing security and product movement visibility.
Zebra’s associate engagement technology solutions, feature hardware and software for shift scheduling, task management, and team communications.
Streamline operations with Zebra’s healthcare technology solutions, featuring hardware and software to improve staff collaboration and optimise workflows.
Zebra’s hospital technology solutions, feature hardware and software for automating health system processes, reducing errors, and ensuring compliance.
Zebra’s patient registration technology solutions, featuring hardware, software, wristbands, and supplies improve patient identification for safer registration.
Optimise critical assets with Zebra’s healthcare asset tracking technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for ensuring equipment readiness.
Improve decision-making with Zebra’s Health Information Technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for enabling secure communication and data access.
Reduce lab errors with Zebra’s sample identification technology solutions, featuring hardware, software, labels, and supplies for accurate sample and specimen labelling.
Improve pharmacy workflows with Zebra’s pharmacy automation technology solutions, featuring hardware, software, labels, and supplies to reduce medication errors.
Zebra’s point-of-care solutions, feature hardware, software, and supplies for mobile access to critical information, patient ID, specimen collection and labelling.
Enhance processes with Zebra’s manufacturing technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for automation, data analysis, and factory connectivity.
Streamline operations with Zebra’s automotive manufacturing technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for reducing downtime and improving processes.
Optimise processes, assembly and supply chain efficiency with Zebra’s electronics manufacturing technology solutions, featuring hardware and software.
Boost production with Zebra’s food and beverage manufacturing technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for compliance and quality monitoring.
Achieve excellence with proactive quality management. Use Zebra’s solutions for precise root cause analysis and quality assurance.
Achieve seamless production with Zebra’s manufacturing WIP solutions, featuring hardware and software for tracking products and spotting bottlenecks early.
Ensure efficiency with Zebra’s material handling technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for automating systems to prevent delays.
Optimise operations and gain inventory and shipment data with Zebra’s supply chain visibility technology solutions, featuring hardware and software.
Boost performance with smart digital solutions. Equip your team with Zebra’s AI-powered tools for real-time guidance and efficient workflows.
Drive efficiency with Zebra’s unified communications solutions, featuring hardware and software for connecting teams for seamless operations.
Achieve excellence with Zebra’s proactive quality management solutions, featuring hardware and software for supporting root cause analysis and assurance.
Gain transparency with Zebra’s manufacturing traceability solutions, featuring hardware and software for tracking products for compliance and quality control.
Prevent downtime with Zebra’s manufacturing asset tracking solutions, featuring hardware and software for efficiently locating equipment and materials.
Zebra’s transportation and logistics technology solutions feature hardware and software for enhancing route planning, visibility, and automating processes.
Protect products with Zebra’s cold chain logistics technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for accurate tracking, monitoring and data logging.
Enhance operations with Zebra’s post and courier technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for package tracking, proof of delivery, and more.
Zebra’s warehousing and distribution technology solutions, feature hardware and software for inventory tracking, order fulfilment, and warehouse automation.
Ensure accuracy with Zebra’s proof of delivery technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for capturing delivery data efficiently.
Improve efficiency with Zebra’s cross docking technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for real-time tracking and automating scanning and labelling.
Zebra’s order processing technology solutions, feature hardware and software for shipping optimisation, order tracking, data analysis and better inventory control.
Zebra’s warehouse inventory management solutions, feature hardware and software for inventory tracking, space utilisation, and data-driven insights.
Zebra’s inbound logistics technology solutions, feature hardware and software for inventory management, order fulfilment, and better visibility of shipments.
Zebra’s reverse logistics technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for better visibility and streamlining receiving, sorting, and managing returns.
Enhance deliveries with Zebra’s outbound logistics technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for ensuring timely, precise shipments.
Zebra’s warehouse asset management technology solutions, featuring hardware and software for improved visibility and control of asset movements.
Zebra's hospitality technology solutions equip your hotel and restaurant staff to deliver superior customer and guest service through inventory tracking and more.
With Zebra's Hospitality Communication Solutions, you can enable real-time communications for your hospitality staff with mobile computers and smartphone devices.
Zebra's card printing solutions allows for fast, on-demand printing of room access keys, VIP badges, loyalty, membership and gift cards
Keep track and stay prepared by monitoring and tracking inventory and asset locations with Zebra's restaurant and hotel inventory management solutions.
Zebra provides food label solutions for restaurants, hotels and more. Our labels meet local regulations for direct and indirect food contact.
Zebra's restaurant mobile POS and ordering devices can increase your restaurant sales, enhance server productivity, and increase guest satisfaction.
Zebra's food safety hardware and software keep your guests safe and enable you to automate food safety procedures, reducing the odds of spreading food-borne illness.
Zebra's QSR software can enable you to increase inventory counts, scan guest loyalty apps, decrease wait times and increase customer satisfaction.
Zebra's market-leading solutions and products improve customer satisfaction with a lower cost per interaction by keeping service representatives connected with colleagues, customers, management and the tools they use to satisfy customers across the supply chain.
Enable field workers to perform pre-sales, sales, route accounting activities and more effectively interact with customers.
Instant access to technical specs and inventory helps improve customer satisfaction.
Mobile computers and printers ensure accurate chain of custody handoff during pick-up and delivery.
Empower your field workers with purpose-driven mobile technology solutions to help them capture and share critical data in any environment.
Zebra's mobile computing portfolio is designed to help utility companies improvement the management and lifecycle of their assets.
Zebra's mobile devices enable your entire staff, from call centre representatives to field technicians, to deliver enhanced customer service through the use of mobile technology.
Zebra's rugged mobile technology solutions provide the field dispatch and routing tools needed to accelerate in-field operations. Learn More.
From first call through incident investigation, Zebra ruggedised mobile solutions enable emergency response personnel to serve public safety and utilities industries more effectively with industry-leading mobility strategies.
Zebra's rugged mobile devices provide your field teams and contractors with complete situational awareness to meet customer service needs.
Zebra's mobile computing solutions provide utilities companies with the tools needed for advanced GIS asset mapping of in-field infrastructure.
Zebra's mobile computing portfolio features tools to help you upgrade processes such as digitising record inspections to speed up efficiencies. Learn More.
Zebra's mobile computing solutions specialise in the real-time, data-powered mobile workflows to help utility companies with inventory management. Learn more.
Zebra's rugged HazLoc mobile devices help optimise your critical operations with safety as a top priority. Learn More.
Zebras field-certified rugged mobile devices connect oil and petrol field workers to real-time critical data. Learn More.
Zebra's mobile technology solutions enable your operators to get real-time remote asset monitoring across your operations. Learn More.
Zebra's rugged mobile computing solutions enable your staff to plan, schedule and complete maintenance and repairs in any environment. Learn More.
Drive successful telecom management with mobile devices designed to meet the demands of public safety and customer service.
Zebra's data-powered mobile technology solutions help you to generate efficiencies across your field service operation in the water industry. Learn More.
Zebra's mobile work order management technology allows you to leverage your existing systems to your operations perform at their very best. Learn More.
Zebra's range of mobile computers equip your workforce with the devices they need from handhelds and tablets to wearables and vehicle-mounted computers.
Zebra's desktop, mobile, industrial, and portable printers for barcode labels, receipts, RFID tags and cards give you smarter ways to track and manage assets.
Zebra's 1D and 2D corded and cordless barcode scanners anticipate any scanning challenge in a variety of environments, whether retail, healthcare, T&L or manufacturing.
Zebra's extensive range of RAIN RFID readers, antennas, and printers give you consistent and accurate tracking.
Choose Zebra's reliable barcode, RFID and card supplies carefully selected to ensure high performance, print quality, durability and readability.
Zebra's location technologies provide real-time tracking for your organisation to better manage and optimise your critical assets and create more efficient workflows.
Zebra's rugged tablets and 2-in-1 laptops are thin and lightweight, yet rugged to work wherever you do on familiar and easy-to-use Windows or Android OS.
With Zebra's family of fixed industrial scanners and machine vision technologies, you can tailor your solutions to your environment and applications.
Zebra’s line of kiosks can meet any self-service or digital signage need, from checking prices and stock on an in-aisle store kiosk to fully-featured kiosks that can be deployed on the wall, counter, desktop or floor in a retail store, hotel, airport check-in gate, physician’s office, local government office and more.
Discover Zebra’s range of accessories from chargers, communication cables to cases to help you customise your mobile device for optimal efficiency.
Zebra's environmental sensors monitor temperature-sensitive products, offering data insights on environmental conditions across industry applications.
Keep labour costs low, your talent happy and your organisation compliant. Create an agile operation that can navigate unexpected schedule changes and customer demand to drive sales, satisfy customers and improve your bottom line.
Empower the front line with prioritised task notification and enhanced communication capabilities for easier collaboration and more efficient task execution.
Get full visibility of your inventory and automatically pinpoint leaks across all channels.
Reduce uncertainty when you anticipate market volatility. Predict, plan and stay agile to align inventory with shifting demand.
Drive down costs while driving up employee, security, and network performance with software designed to enhance Zebra's wireless infrastructure and mobile solutions.
Explore Zebra’s printer software to integrate, manage and monitor printers easily, maximizing IT resources and minimizing down time.
Make the most of every stage of your scanning journey from deployment to optimization. Zebra's barcode scanner software lets you keep devices current and adapt them to your business needs for a stronger ROI across the full lifecycle.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
Zebra DNA is the industry’s broadest suite of enterprise software that delivers an ideal experience for all during the entire lifetime of every Zebra device.
Advance your digital transformation and execute your strategic plans with the help of the right location and tracking technology.
The Zebra Aurora suite of machine vision software enables users to solve their track-and-trace, vision inspection and industrial automation needs.
Zebra Aurora Focus brings a new level of simplicity to controlling enterprise-wide manufacturing and logistics automation solutions. With this powerful interface, it’s easy to set up, deploy and run Zebra’s Fixed Industrial Scanners and Machine Vision Smart Cameras, eliminating the need for different tools and reducing training and deployment time.
Aurora Imaging Library™, formerly Matrox Imaging Library, machine-vision software development kit (SDK) has a deep collection of tools for image capture, processing, analysis, annotation, display, and archiving. Code-level customization starts here.
Aurora Design Assistant™, formerly Matrox Design Assistant, integrated development environment (IDE) is a flowchart-based platform for building machine vision applications, with templates to speed up development and bring solutions online quicker.
Designed for experienced programmers proficient in vision applications, Aurora Vision Library provides the same sophisticated functionality as our Aurora Vision Studio software but presented in programming language.
Aurora Vision Studio, an image processing software for machine & computer vision engineers, allows quick creation, integration & monitoring of powerful OEM vision applications.
Adding innovative tech is critical to your success, but it can be complex and disruptive. Professional Services help you accelerate adoption, and maximise productivity without affecting your workflows, business processes and finances.
Zebra's Managed Service delivers worry-free device management to ensure ultimate uptime for your Zebra Mobile Computers and Printers via dedicated experts.
Find ways you can contact Zebra Technologies’ Support, including Email and Chat, ask a technical question or initiate a Repair Request.
Zebra's Circular Economy Program helps you manage today’s challenges and plan for tomorrow with smart solutions that are good for your budget and the environment.
If you’re in retail, chances are you’ve heard that inventory accuracy is the key to success.
That advice counts double in a pandemic.
You see, in-store shopping is no longer as simple as it once was. Pre-pandemic, many customers came to stores just to browse and interact with product. Consumers could find substitutions easily, perhaps trying a new brand when needed, and a shopping visit not resulting in a purchase was nothing serious (for the customer, at least).
How things have changed! For a customer, a store is no longer a casual place to visit, browse and leave. That could be why we are seeing non-contact shopping options like buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS), click and collect, and curbside pickup grow exponentially in popularity. But sometimes, customers find the only way they can get what they need is by walking up and down the aisles themselves, especially when shopping for the best-looking produce or fresh meat for their evening guests. When that’s the case, we are seeing customers buy more items per trip to minimize the need for frequent repeat visits.
As such, the trips tend to have one other thing in common: they are well-researched. Customers want to make their trips as efficient as possible, so they tend to do their homework before leaving the house. They search their favorite retailers’ websites, checking pricing, availability and item location to ensure when they reach the store they know exactly where they’re going and what to buy. In and out quick.
That being said, the fact that more customers are shopping more online means that inventory accuracies are much, much more serious than they were before the pandemic. If a customer went into the store pre-pandemic and found a needed item out of stock, it wasn’t a huge deal. Substitutes were widely available, and the customer would likely go ahead and settle with one of the available options out of convenience – meaning that, despite the unfortunate inaccuracy, the retailer still made the sale.
With more customers essentially shopping online first, inventory inaccuracies have become riskier. When a retailer realizes it has an inventory accuracy problem for a specific universal product code (UPC), or inventory counts reach a preset, low-quantity threshold, the item is taken off the website until the issue is resolved. This means that even if the retailer still has the product on the shelf in the store, a customer searching for that same product online will see it listed as unavailable and assume that it is out of stock in both places. Because the online customer can easily find another retailer carrying the same product before leaving home, all it takes is a quick internet search and the retailer with the inventory inaccuracy has lost a sale (or worse, a once-loyal customer).
In other words, inventory optimization is critical for retailers who want to succeed in the new normal. If a customer is already braving the risk of COVID-19 to enter your store, the last thing you want to happen is for them to walk in and find the item they came for out of stock. If your website indicated the item was in fact in stock, prompting a trip to the store, the customer may never shop at your store again.
I can’t stress this enough: inventory is your most important asset and your greatest capital expense – and the time to optimize it is now!
But optimizing inventory performance is tough. Inventory assortments are larger and more complex to manage than ever before, making it hard to identify shrink, slow-selling products, cement products (that occupied shelves and are not being productive), inaccuracies and out of stocks. New channels of commerce create even more movement to keep track of. And there’s the risk of non-compliance by associates. A shipper who brings a carton to the wrong store, a buyer who enters the wrong price in the inventory master list or an employee who forgets to restock a single product can trigger a ripple of problems for retailers and their customers.
That’s why many of our customers are adopting the Zebra Prescriptive Analytics inventory module to keep a closer eye on their inventory.
The inventory module drives inventory performance by predicting out of stocks, ensuring planogram compliance, forecasting risk and flagging items with potentially high shrink, improving stock accuracy and more. When an issue occurs, the module’s advanced root-cause analysis can trace it right back to the source and direct an appropriate response, factoring in its financial impact and how it should be prioritized.
Here are some use cases showing how retailers have used Zebra Prescriptive Analytics to resolve inventory errors before they could greatly affect the customer experience:
A grocer had slightly higher waste than usual related to expired milk at two of its stores. Every month, the stores threw out many gallons of milk that had reached their expiration dates, totaling more than $15,000 per year. Operations insisted that the store wasn’t following proper procedure, but the store managers said that corporate was allocating too much milk via its planogram for the dairy case refrigerator. The grocer’s existing analytics system could not trace the root cause. The workers continued to throw away the milk, and out of stocks were frequent.
When the grocer adopted the Zebra Prescriptive Analytics inventory module, the problem became clear. In order to control shrink, the grocer required that unsold milk be marked down at 50% three days before its expiration as a “manager’s special.” At the stores with higher waste, however, the dairy department workers were not following this procedure due to a training gap. Compounding the problem at one store was the fact that the general manager was hired from another grocer that didn’t implement the practice of marking down near-expired dairy. With no incentive for customers to buy the near-expired milk, combined with poor rotation (another training gap), it spoiled on the shelf, and the workers threw it out. The grocer retrained the dairy staff at the two stores, eliminating the annual $15,000 in waste.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic’s panic buying, a general retailer adopted the Zebra Prescriptive Analytics inventory module to help ensure it was keeping its most critical products stocked. It quickly detected a store that showed plenty of liquid soap in its inventory but hadn’t sold any for several hours, resulting in an estimated $400 in missed sales. The manager for the store received a prescriptive action directing him to verify on-shelf availability for the soap.
The manager went to the body care aisle and found that there was soap on the shelf, but it was at the back. The springs of the shelf display were broken and not pushing the soap forward as expected. Since the shelf was at waist height, it was impossible for customers to see or even reach the remaining soap without contorting themselves awkwardly.
The manager moved the soap toward the front of the shelf where it could more easily be seen and issued instructions for employees to do the same when restocking. Sales immediately resumed following corrective action. A facilities team was also called in to fix the springs on the shelf display.
A hardware retailer knew that it was suffering millions of dollars per year in damages and wanted to tackle it at the store level. It deployed a pattern via the Zebra Prescriptive Analytics inventory module to monitor individual stores for high damage claims.
Shortly after deployment, the pattern alerted a regional manager to a store that had reported 256 units as damaged in a single day, amounting to more than $11,000. The regional manager went to the store to investigate and found that two new associates had improperly scanned the items to damages simply because they didn’t know how to process the right code otherwise. The perfectly sellable products were now on their way to a destruction facility. Thanks to the near real-time alert, the regional manager was able to intercept the shipment and return it to the store for sale. The associates were also retrained on unit scanning to avoid such problems in the future.
Many inventory inaccuracy problems can easily be solved and losses easily mitigated by looking at your operations through a different lens, rather than reports. Though reports theoretically give you all the data you need (and then some), it tends to be faster to see data-driven behavioral patterns and correlate certain actions (or inactions) related to large-scale inventory issues via prescriptive analytics’ simple tasking since it tells you what to do to fix the problem. Reports just send you on a fact-finding mission through mountains of data. They don’t tell you what happened or “prescribe” a solution.
Guy Yehiav previously served as the General Manager of Zebra Analytics, where was responsible for setting the organic and non-organic growth, leadership strategy, and customer success for the Zebra Analytics business unit.
He was formerly the CEO of Profitect, which Zebra acquired. Guy is a 25+ year veteran of the supply chain industry and has held senior leadership positions at Oracle. He was previously the founder of Demantra US, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006.
Fluent in English, French, and Hebrew, Mr. Yehiav has a passion for teaching, which started with educating high-school students pro bono in his native country of Israel. He continues to teach pro bono, now as a guest lecturer on professional selling, entrepreneurship, and statistics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Babson College.
Mr. Yehiav holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Industrial Management from Shenkar College of Israel and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College. He currently lives in Wellesley, Mass. with his wife, Maya, and their three daughters.
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