The launch of the second plan aims to build on the same momentum – helping retailers with manpower-saving technologies. But beyond resolving the industry’s manpower crunch, technology is also changing the way retailers sell.
Stock-taking is the bane of retailers, as it is typically an arduous task that takes hours. But with radio frequency identification (RFID), the same job can now be done in under an hour.
Home-grown retailer Decks has managed to save more than 2,300 man-hours a month, since it started using the technology for inventory management.
“In the future we know that the manpower issue will become more serious than it is now. In order to be more attractive to employ better workers, I think we should engage all this technology to help to lighten the workload of every employee,” said Mr Kelvyn Chee, managing director of Decks.
RFID is just one of the many technologies available to the retail sector, even though they may not be widely adopted.
PLAYING CATCH-UP
Industry players and market researchers have said that retailers in Singapore are behind their international peers in technology adoption. Besides cost, another reason is that they have not seen the need to innovate until now, with the e-commerce sector nipping at their heels.
“The development of e-commerce in Singapore has been at the lower level than many other parts of the world. But that’s changing very dramatically. I think that’s what’s sort of giving rise to some of this tension where the retailers have not needed to change quite as quickly, when e-commerce was falling behind, but it is really taking up,” said PwC Singapore’s digital business leader Greg Unsworth.
The innovation arm of the Singapore Institute of Retail Studies is helping retailers to play catch-up. It showcases and advises retailers on the various technologies available.
“Companies want to embark on data analytics because these are things that will help the business going forward,” said Mr James Fong, deputy manager of programme development at Singapore Institute of Retail Studies. “With knowledge, it does help the business to be more agile, it helps the business to be more able to predict the trend and so forth. So data analytics, having said that, is one of the new areas will take some time for this to evolve.”
Pushing the frontier of data mining is the use of video analytics, a move that Decks has embarked on. The technology solutions company behind the in-store CCTV camera is able to interpret the images and provide critical business intelligence.
“Examples of what we can provide them in terms of data and insights would be how many people come to the store, when they come to the store what do they do, how they spend their time going through the store,” explained Mr Tan Liong Hai, sales director of Kai Square.
With this information, Decks has been able to come up with more targeted marketing campaigns, which it says have helped to boost sales by 10 per cent.
The retailer continues to look at new innovations, for example, having a smart dressing room to enhance in-store experience, or incorporating the Automated Retrieval and Storage System to streamline backend operations.
Said Mr Chee: “Everybody thinks that all these technology implemented is to replace the human beings but I think otherwise. We just want the staff or the sales assistant to focus more on customer rather than spend time on unnecessary tasks. So we want to make the shopping experience more personalised, more service-oriented.”
Mr Unsworth added that technology could result in a convergence of physical and online retailers.
He explained: “I think retail at the moment – you sort of have the established large retailers, who tend to have a mainly physical presence, you have e-commerce companies who tend to have an online presence. I think everything is going to merge in the middle. So you have this sort of convergence of the two coming together where increasingly, it will be a multi-platform approach that consumers are looking for and that retailers will have to provide.”
While some retailers in Singapore on both sides of the spectrum have started moving in that direction, experts have said they are still in the early stages.
