In large retail chains, efficiency is a competitive advantage. Retail chains operate thousands of SKUs over dozens of stores, and speed at which prices, promotions, and product information can be updated on the shelf can determine profitability, store traffic, and customer satisfaction. This article is geared towards B2B buyers such as store operations leaders, store procurement, IT decision makers, executives assessing scalable price and product information systems, and the like.
For executives examining options, determining the overall cost and value of an opportunity is the starting point of consideration. Executives ought to consider a higher gain in the long run by eliminating the e ink display cost against the value of more frequent price updates and increased shelf accuracy through electronic shelf edge labels. With large chains, the goal becomes to eliminate the laborious, costly, and mistake-ridden processes and transform to a more centralized and data-driven workflow that can span many stores and product categories. Below is a more efficient structured view of how to apply this technology in a B2B context.
The Purpose and Importance of Electronic Shelf Edge Labels
- General information and function: Digital price and product info displays are attached to shelves and are referred to as electronic shelf edge edge labels. These displays are designed to look like traditional paper price labels and use e-ink technology. Displays are updated remotely through a central management portal. This allows management to adjust prices remotely and instantly across thousands of SKUs and multiple store locations without the need to manually change price labels.
- Major functions of large chain stores:
- Immediate price and promotion changes: Real central pricing systems send instant price changes to entire store systems.
- Flexible promotion and advertising: Z promotion can be instantaneously advertised, and stores can change advertising for promoted Z items based on the layout, tier, stock, and availability of the promotion.
- Correct product information: In addition to pricing, only labels can indicate stock availability, the price per unit, and key details to help shoppers make purchase decisions.
- Record keeping and price audits: Stores can easily demonstrate a price to audit, and record of price and tag changes made with a timestamp.
The positive impact of price change on labor and store activity: Price change labor can be reallocated to assist in shopper engagement, shelving, and merchandising. Less manual label changes means fewer printing errors and mislabeling which can lead to price discrepancies and disputes at checkout.
Best Practices for Change Management and Working with Vendors
- Getting stakeholders aligned early: Employee engagement is imperative in these functions for lasting sustainability: merchandising. store operations, IT, finance, and procurement. Consider creating a governance model that designates responsibility for data feeds, updates, and escalations.
- Selecting partners with the ability to scale: Choose vendors that provide modular software, have established service-level agreements (SLAs), provide documented security, and have enterprise-aligned roadmaps. Confirm that sufficient exit and migration plans are available should the need to re-platform arise.
- Investing in the quality of the data: Electronic shelf edge labels only provide value if the data is right. Consider instituting data validation, regular reconciliations, and alerts on data variances between master and shelf displayed data.
- Provisioning for training and enablement: Prepare training materials for all roles for field store, regional manager, and field technician. Provide training on promotion processing, exception handling, and hardware maintenance.
- Improving with each cycle: Set up a schedule to review deployment data at intervals of not less than 90 calendar days focusing on update lag time, error rate, and hours of labor saved. Utilize the data to improve other data deployment processes, other templates, and other classification/ category rules.
- Addressing security and compliance: When there are multiple connected devices, security is a shared exercise. Ensure that you have the latest firmware, have implemented strong access controls, and the usage of anomaly detection during update processes, and have scheduled regular security assessments.
- Lifecycle Management: Strategize on hardware refresh, battery replacement, and software updates. A proactive refresh strategy limits unplanned downtimes, ensures optimal performance, and seamlessly integrates with standards of upcoming data.
Integrative Scenarios and Practical Tips for B2B Implementations
- Multi-banner Deployments: When deploying across a corporate family that has multiple banners, customize content governance for banner-level promotions and localized governance, while keeping a centralized data management for consistency. Use hierarchical permissions to achieve a local governance balance with corporate controls.
- Cross-channel Coherence: Integrate shelf-edge display updates with online pricing, loyalty app promotions alongside in-store signage. A cohesive strategy minimizes intra-channel price discrepancies and strengthens brand cohesion.
- Data Redundancy and Disaster Recovery: Implement segment control with double-feeding paths and offline-capable label updates in hubs. This minimizes pricing discrepancies when multiple regional networks experience outages or scheduled maintenance.
- Customization vs Standardization: Give greater emphasis to standardizing label formats, and data fields to maximize efficiency and maintenance ease. Controlled exceptions should be made for localized initiatives such as regional promotions or seasonal activities that can involve rapid localized updates.
- Metrics Driven Management: Assign dashboards that incorporate multiple dimensions, such as update delays, price discrepancies, labor hours saved, promotion speed, and customer impact. Differentiate these metrics to sustain other investments and describe them for subsequent phases.
Real Life Examples of Readiness Signals for the Big Box Retailers
- Master data governance maturity: Building out a master data system with clean product information (attributes), pricing schedules, and promotion histories is core to the foundation.
- Scalable IT architecture: Scalable label management system with APIs and integration capabilities to ERP, POS, and merchandising tools is a must for enterprise-wide deployments.
- Change management readiness: Organizations that manage to succeed with electronic shelf edge labels tend to have structured training, data and updates ownership, and executive sponsorship to manual workload shifts.
- Vendor ecosystem alignment: A mature vendor ecosystem that offers not only hardware and software but also consulting, deployment playbooks, and sustained optimization is a plus.
Conclusion: B2B Buyers Strategic Implications
Investing in electronic shelf edge labels is a way for retailers to achieve greater operational efficiencies while improving pricing agility and preserving data integrity across their networks. In the case of B2B buyers, the investment decision requires a prudent assessment of the impacts of total cost of ownership, lifecycle, and the scalability of the investment across a multitude of stores and product categories. The benefits gained from the technology manifest in the form of improved price change velocity, greater accuracy of shelf inventory, better workforce agility, and greater consumer trust which positively impacts profitability, inventory turnover, and consumer satisfaction. With the phased implementation of innovative data governance, substantial change management, and electronic shelf edge labels, large and complex retail stores will achieve increased efficiency and competitiveness in the evolving retail sector.
