Retail Asia Expo (RAE), the region’s premier retail trade fair, opened on 10 June. Checkpoint Systems, a leading supplier of merchandise availability solutions for the retail industry, showcased its latest range of 9th Generation Evolve EAS antennas, Clear EP micro RF labels, Source Tagging solutions, Alpha high theft solutions for HBC merchandize and RFID Apparel solutions to improve out-of-stock at the three-day event.
"Our EAS and RFID solutions enable retailers to improve merchandise availability by ensuring out-of-stocks and missing merchandize situations are under control. This allows for a positive customer shopping experience while also allowing the retailer to increase sales opportunities" said Benedict Chua, Product Director of Asia-Pacific Merchandized Availability Solutions, Checkpoint Systems.
"Take the Alpha keepers we are showcasing here as an example,” said Chua. "They are very well accepted by retailers in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia."
According to Chua, small, lightweight and easily hidden products are more likely than others to be targeted for theft in retail stores. Many of these high-theft items carry hefty price tags, like designer handbags, or bring the retailer high margins, like razor blades. Alpha High-Theft Solutions provide retailers with well-designed and affordable ways to protect items most likely to be stolen.
In Southeast Asia, retailers prefer Alpha keepers to reduce theft in some situations as they are secured and can be reused. "If they were to invest in keepers, it’s a one-time cost and typically the payback is within a year," he explained.
Some Hong Kong retailers also use Alpha keepers in their stores. "One of our local customers has been using Alpha keepers to protect high-theft merchandises. For example, there is a major Supermarket chain in HK using our bottle security cap on the wines," said Arthur Lam, Business Development Manager of Checkpoint Systems HK.
Chua also shared the highly successful Source Tagging program whereby retailers receive the merchandize with the EAS RF label embedded into the merchandize, include shoes. The EAS labels solutions show are paper thin labels which could be a simple plain label to a highly customized round tamper type label with custom print logo and messages.
Another primary segment Checkpoint showcased at RAE is Apparel Labeling Solutions. It includes the company’s web-based data management service and network of service bureaus which supplies customers with customized retail apparel tags and labels.
Ever since barcodes were introduced and retailers adopted Electronic Data Interchange to track the flow of apparel products into and out of their stores, apparel labels have transformed into a multi-function tool which does not only convey baseline information such as brand name and price but also critical data which can be used by retailers to manage supply chain, reduce inventory shrinkage and enhance operational efficiencies.
By integrating loss prevention and merchandise visibility functionality into traditional apparel tags, Checkpoint helps retailers reduce costs and improve operational synergies in their stores and throughout their supply chains. It also has helped the industry migrate easily from integrated loss prevention-based apparel labels to RFID-based solutions.
"In a store powered by RFID technology, every product has an individual tag attached to it. If a garment is taken away from the store without being paid for, it will trigger the alarm as the system will read all the tags inside and compare with the database," Ming Feng, Retail Solution Development Director, Checkpoint Systems China, explained how Checkpoint’s RFID solution applied loss prevention on apparel tags to help retailers protect merchandise.
With almost 40 years’ experience in shrink management and merchandising solutions for the retail industry, Checkpoint had primarily focussed on loss prevention. Now the US technology giant is transforming into a full retail solution provider.
"We have got a lot of requests from retailers about EAS Reporting and also visitor counting solutions. This is the area that we are getting more involved in. It works together with the EAS solutions. With our web-hosted service, the client will be able to log into our EAS Exception reporting and Compliance software service to review EAS reports every day, monitor, record and analyse EAS activity across entire chain," said Benedict Chua.
Once logged into the system, the store manager will access a dashboard showing information such as how many EAS alarms they have, at which store, in which location as well as the visitor counting data.
"If you are a store manager who is too busy to see the full report, you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you monitor the store better and take actions quickly once you get an alert on exceptions. For example, if the store exceeds a certain amount of people, the system will send you alerts via pagers or emails. Or if there are too many shoppers queuing up at the checkouts, the system will send an alert to you so that you can open more checkouts," he noted.
"All in all, we are trying to offer our expertise for the retail ecosystem and provide the Asian retail industry with one-stop retail solutions to maximum profitability," Chua concluded.