SmartStores is not just a future vision of retail, it is a reality today. There are many stores that use RFID technology and some retail outlets even use smart cards, smart scales, and smart shelves today.
Retailers such as Pak’n Save in New Zealand supply hand held scanners where customers can scan their own grocery items before being placed in their shopping cart. In Malaysia, smart shelves are used to pinpoint the exact location of books in Multimedia University Library. In the USA, Wallmart – one of the biggest users of RFID, insist that their suppliers also use this technology. But to be a true SmartStore, retail outlets need item level RFID tagging, not just RFID tagging at pellet or case level. The first stores in the world to become SmartStores were two BGN stores back in 2006.
BGN a Dutch Bookseller, was the first to deploy item-level RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) in an SOA (service oriented architecture) in 2006. Unlike early generation RFID solutions that tagged at the pallet or case-level, BGN is using item-level RFID to track the movement of individual books. This provides BGN with unique real-time visibility into both their store inventory and the overall supply chain. BGN is deploying technology from four Progress product lines that deliver this unique retail application: Progress(R) OpenEdge(R) as the platform for all transactions processed by the stores, Apama(R) ESP for processing the RFID data, Sonic ESB(R) as the integration backbone for the store automation applications and Progress(R) EasyAsk for natural language access to the application by end users.
In 2007 BGN was approved as a “Laureate” in the ‘Computerworld Honors Program‘ for their Selexyz ‘SmartStores’. This program recognizes outstanding leaders of the information technology revolution.
