Zebra's Industry Solutions can give your business a competitive advantage by connecting people, assets and data to help you make better decisions.
Scale and energize your retail strategy with a digital backbone that unifies your team, informs priorities and drives results with Zebra's retail technology solutions.
Zebra’s mobile computing, scanning, and printing solutions connect each operational area in your warehouse to give you the agility to realize transformational gains.
Zebra's healthcare technology solutions provide patient identity management, mobile health devices, and business intelligence data to improve efficiency.
Zebra’s manufacturing technology solutions enable manufacturers to become more agile, optimize plant floor performance and embrace market changes.
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.
In today's world, the demands on transportation and logistics companies are higher than ever. Dedicated Warehouse, Fleet and Delivery, and Yard and Terminal solutions enable visibility to every aspect of your business and keep operations running flawlessly around the clock.
Zebra's hospitality technology solutions equip your hotel and restaurant staff to deliver superior customer and guest service through inventory tracking and more.
Empower your field workers with purpose-driven mobile technology solutions to help them capture and share critical data in any environment.
Learn how Zebra's public sector technology solutions empower state and local governments to improve efficiency with asset tracking and data capture devices.
Zebra's range of Banking technology solutions enables banks to minimize costs and to increase revenue throughout their branch network. 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 organization to better manage and optimize 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.
Discover Zebra’s range of accessories from chargers, communication cables to cases to help you customize your mobile device for optimal efficiency.
Zebra's OEM scan engines, imagers, and private label OEM products offer flexible integration and help enhance product development with modern OEM technology.
Zebra's environmental sensors monitor temperature-sensitive products, offering data insights on environmental conditions across industry applications.
Keep labor costs low, your talent happy and your organization 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 prioritized 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.
The Zebra Aurora suite of industrial automation software enables users of all experience levels to solve their track-and-trace and vision inspection needs.
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.
Adding innovative tech is critical to your success, but it can be complex and disruptive. Professional Services help you accelerate adoption, and maximize 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.
The Zebra Knowledge Center provides learning expertise that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your environment.
Zebra has a wide variety of courses to train you and your staff, ranging from scheduled sessions to remote offerings as well as custom tailored to your specific needs.
Build your reputation with Zebra's certification offerings. Zebra offers a variety of options that can help you progress your career path forward.
Build your reputation with Zebra's certification offerings. Zebra offers a variety of options that can help you progress your career path forward.
Recent research by Zebra Technologies shows that the pressure for retailers to avoid out of stocks has never been higher. In Zebra’s 2020 Global Shopper Study, a remarkable 39 percent of retail shoppers reported leaving a store without purchasing anything. Why? At least one item they wanted or needed was out of stock – or at least not on the shelf. Retailers simply cannot afford to alienate such a huge portion of their customer base. The time to improve inventory management practices is now.
Though it has never been more challenging to accurately predict demand, it is possible – and essential. But accommodating heightened demand is about more than just accurate forecasting. It’s also about knowing how to use the inventory and other resources you have on hand to sustain the increase in sales by any means necessary.
So, how do you improve your ability to accommodate unexpected demand surges? Numerous Zebra retail customers have asked me this question since the COVID-19 outbreak started increasing operational pressure, and my answer has never changed.
It all starts with leveraging technology, such as prescriptive analytics, to analyze data and increase visibility across the business so that you can understand:
At a more granular level, Zebra’s retail customers are deploying “patterns” (algorithms) to identify very specific data behaviors that indicate opportunities for inventory optimization and inform appropriate stakeholders about how to take action. Here are some examples of those patterns:
Sometimes even your best efforts can’t prevent an item from running out. When this happens, expediting replenishment is an option. But this can be a major expense. So, how do you figure out which products are worth the cost of expediting? Is it even feasible?
It comes down to balancing the cost of expedition, the popularity of the out-of-stock items, consumer behavior and how many stores are sold out of them. This pattern identifies the items that are popular enough to justify the added expenses, as well as the best volume to expedite to certain stores and warehouses for maximum distribution efficiency. It then sends this information to your buyers and/or allocators, directing them to take proper action.
There are other variations of this pattern, including one that identifies the most feasible orders for “drop shipment,” whereby a store receives product directly from the manufacturer, not a warehouse or other intermediary. It’s important to automate this process, as drop shipping can be costly and labor-intensive. You need to know exactly when they are appropriate. The pattern continually monitors the ratio of demand to item shipments, ensuring that new orders are in line with customer demand. It registers any inconsistencies and issues corrective actions for them in real time, minimizing waste and increasing return on inventory assets.
If a busy store is in danger of running out of popular merchandise, you need to be able to tap other stores’ inventories to relieve the pressure. This pattern is especially useful for orders placed online as it doesn’t matter where the order is fulfilled, as long as it is fulfilled accurately and sitting at the pickup location on time. By identifying stores with slower sales, you can tap their inventories to help fulfill online orders for the more heavily trafficked stores at which inventory shelf availability is a priority.
The pattern can also determine whether it is easier and more cost-effective for the slower stores to simply fulfill orders by shipping items directly to customers. Few retailers will find it effective to re-balance their inventories across the network (i.e. return the highest-demand items back to distribution centers from stores, then re-distribute them to stores based on need). It is easier and more cost-efficient for slow-selling stores with inventory to spare to just ship these items direct to consumers in other zones. This also ensures inventory can be consumed before it becomes out of date.
In the current retail environment, it has become popular for customers to place orders online and then pick them up in person. It’s important for your stores to balance what inventory they have on hand between orders placed online and purchased during in-store shopping trips. This pattern identifies items that are especially popular for pickup orders and calculates how much each store should reserve for these types of orders versus “walk-in” purchases to satisfy consumers equally in both shopping scenarios. It then sends out a prescriptive action directing department managers to “tag” a certain number of each item as in-store inventory only.
Few things make inventory management harder than “phantom inventory syndrome.” This is when your inventory management system calculates that certain items are available when they are not. This is especially problematic for “buy online, pickup in store” (BOPIS)/curbside pickup customers. If your website says a product is in stock, but the employee fulfilling the order can’t find it on the shelf or stockroom and either substitutes an unwanted item or cancels the item altogether, the customer may never shop at your store (or online, for that matter) again. They’ll likely start shopping at another retailer who can get them what they need or want. This is especially true when customers are paying a personal shopper or delivery fee for the service. When they only receive a quarter of what they ordered, they may find themselves having to pay another fee for a follow up order to hopefully get their items. Over time, these additional customer costs could cost you loyal customers.
Fortunately, this family of prescriptive patterns helps your stores identify phantom inventory – before the customer gets upset – by flagging items that are marked “inventory on hand” in the system but sales of items suddenly decrease or stop altogether. Explanations could be misplacement, theft, unreported damages, shipping misalignment with no claims filed or just a simple out-of-stock that needs to be refilled from the back room. The pattern empowers employees to investigate and correct any issues.
This type of pattern identifies a sudden change in consumption behavior that is significant enough to warrant a change in ordering behaviors. It leverages the solution’s demand sensing capabilities to analyze inventory model stock, safety levels and the supply chain’s ability to accommodate these changes in demand. Without this pattern, a demand change could create a major “bullwhip” effect that is tough to escape. For example, if the ratio suddenly changes, the prescriptive analytics solution will direct the retailer’s buyers to ask the manufacturer for a direct drop ship at each affected store, expediting the delivery and preventing the bullwhip effect from impacting the “regular” supply chain (i.e. all the different nodes between manufacturer and retailer).
Many retailers have told me that, right now, it feels as though they are spending all day, every day, just trying to stay on top of demand. Even those who felt prepared for a situation like COVID-19 are finding themselves racing to restock store shelves to minimize online order substitutions or cancellations and in-store customer walkouts. Though it may not seem like the right time to implement new technology solutions, I recommend that you at least consider the almost instantaneous benefits you could gain – and pass along to shoppers – by implementing a prescriptive analytics solution to increase your inventory on hand and create an exceptional customer experience. If you can accurately assess your inventory situation in real time, you will be able to make proactive changes to your supply chain flow and reduce the high rate of out-of-stocks that is currently challenging customer satisfaction. It will also empower your people to take immediate corrective action to avoid missed sales opportunities and, when needed, communicate out-of-stocks to customers so that they can make more informed decisions about their selections and/or timing of online orders or in-person shopping trips.
If you’d be interested in learning more about how prescriptive analytics could be implemented into your current technology architecture with minimal resources needed, please reach out to my team. We’re happy to answer any questions or provide more detail about how this could work in the current retail environment.
Find more technical discussions on our Developer Portal blog.
Visit the Zebra Story Hub for more interviews, news, and industry trend analysis.
Legal Terms of Use Privacy Policy Supply Chain Transparency
ZEBRA and the stylized Zebra head are trademarks of Zebra Technologies Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2023 Zebra Technologies Corp. and/or its affiliates.