Progressive Grocer Talks With Zebra Technologies About 3 New Retail Solutions
Digital solutions provider Zebra Technologies Corp., which built its business on handheld scanners and barcode printers, continues to improve on its scanning technologies. The Lincolnshire, Ill.- based company is rolling out three new solutions that benefit retailers by improving both customer experiences and employee productivity.
As retailers, including grocers, continue to look for ways to enhance the buying journey and payment process, Zebra has designed a new kiosk system for self-checkout and assisted checkout. The modular units are available with 15-in. and 22-in. screens and feature tap-to-pay capabilities, support for all major payment terminals and a natural language voice assistant.
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“It’s a very elegant solution and is customer driven. Retailers said they need kiosks for this or that at the store and don’t want another vendor. It pushed us to lean into this and what I’ve been stunned by is the variety of use cases,” Matthew Guiste, retail industry principal at Zebra, told Progressive Grocer in a recent interview. Those uses cases include touchscreen ordering for fresh food, deli items, coffee and other products, as well as search and navigation options.
“I hardly run into a retailer that has no use for a kiosk,” Guiste added.
Zebra is also unveiling a new workforce solution called Workcloud Actionable Intelligence 7.0, with an AI-based analytics platform. Powered by Google Cloud, the platform has a serverless query engine and automates task assignment, action verification and data analysis. “This takes existing data sets and through the process, pulls them into the tool itself. It has machine learning and AI and layers on data, with an eight-year lifecycle,” said Guiste.
In another development aimed at optimizing internal efficiencies, Zebra is offering two new tablets for back-end and warehouse operations. The company’s rugged tablets are now available for Windows and include an AI-enabled touchscreen for improved accuracy and performance across warehouses, transportation and logistics, manufacturing and field service functions.
According to Guiste, the speed of business and changing customer demands are fueling more innovations for the modern store. “In a low-margin business, grocers have to have connectivity tools to support all of the circumstances and use cases,” he told Progressive Grocer.
