It's the year 2015. Electronic price labels are being regarded by retail experts as an innovative technology that will soon gain widespread acceptance. There have not been large rollouts in the retail sectorso far, and experience with the technology is largely limited to individual pilot stores.
Media Saturn decides to take a pioneering role at the beginning of 2015 and roll out electronic price labels in 14 countries throughout Europe. With this project, the company is reacting to the changed market requirements and laying the foundation for its own omnichannel strategy. The concept provides dynamic price adjustments based on a national pricing strategy, making it much more complex than the first pilots.
The system integrator xplace is won as project partner with whom Media Saturn has already been working successfully in the digital signage and kiosk systems business. In a testing phase, the company also decides on digital price labels from the manufacturer SES Imagotag.
For such a large-scale rollout, the technology has to be extended in order to integrate different conditions and requirements of all 14 national companies into the system. These include data management with different product information management systems (PIM) and individual template designs.
To ensure the permanent functionality of the individual electronic price labels, a label monitoring system during operation is necessary.
The tight schedule of the entire project leaves little room for test installations. In addition, the product itself is still in the introductory phase and therefore carries a risk of "childhood illnesses" and lack in manageability.
After a detailed requirements analysis, various measures are taken to meet the project goals. A middleware developed by xplace as translation and transport level enables a connection of price data of all national companies across different PIM systems. The existing data sets and the individual design requirements are integrated into the development of the respective templates.
Setting up an active monitoring system ensures the functionality of the individual price labels during operation. Thanks to the communication platform, support alters are communicated to xplace immediately and can be solved. Via a separate dashboard, the user can also view battery statuses, failed updates, etc. and take appropriate action. Users are introduced to the system in intensive on-site training courses.
An agile project structure enables dynamic adaptation processes. Experience from previous rollouts are incorporated and the project planning can be adapted accordingly.
Our goal is to offer our customers the best possible service. Transparent and accurate prices as well as product information are essential for this. Thanks to our constant partner xplace, we were able to successfully implement the ESL project in a record time of just three month in 30 Media Markt stores in Russia.
Through software and hardware adaptations, the system integrator xplace adapted this innovative technology to the individual use cases. These adaptations were rerequisite to the implementation of the electronic pricing technology across all countries. With the installation of 12 million labels in 1,000 stores, the largest electronic price label project so far was completed within 20 months.
