At the NRF 2021 virtual event, Fujitsu and Fujitsu Frontech North America Inc. will highlight the digital transformation solutions that will help retailers respond to the shifting retail dynamics and consumer behaviors accelerated by the global COVID-19 pandemic. The solutions place customers at the center of a human-centric model and enable retailers to seamlessly orchestrate their inventory, enhance operations, optimize their pick processes for online orders, and easily create new self-service solutions.

The ongoing global pandemic has created a new retail environment characterized by rapidly changing consumer values and behaviors. Retail operations must be agile enough to cater to myriad customer preferences, delivering shopping options ranging from a full online shopping experience, curbside pickup, same-day delivery, grocery delivery through a third-party app, or click and collect.

Richard Clarke, Executive Director, Global Retail at Fujitsu, says: “Retailers are reimagining themselves and shifting from the conventional supplier-centric model to a human-centric model, where shoppers are fully in control of their purchase journey. To lay the foundations for future success, retailers must focus on technology investments that closely map these new expectations for customer experience.”

“Retail is becoming more competitive and more reliant on technology, especially amid COVID-19,” adds Paul Burel, Senior Director and Consumer Industry Consultant at Fujitsu America, Inc. “As retailers grapple with what the new normal looks like, optimization, agility, and flexibility are key. Now is the time to build a seamlessly connected retail experience that delivers a more resilient in-store and online operation, all to deliver consumers what they want, where and when they want it.”

At NRF 2021 – Chapter 1, Fujitsu will showcase a variety of its digital transformation technologies that can help retailers reimagine their strategies, transform and optimize operations through COVID-19 and beyond, including:

Digital Annealer: Fujitsu’s quantum-inspired optimization platform quickly solves a variety of large-scale, complex retail use cases from apparel personalization to supply chain optimization, including inventory routing optimization to enhance the timeliness of deliveries from warehouses to retail locations; Last-mile delivery optimization to reduce the number of vans and resources needed for given workload; Order Picking Route Optimization (Buy-Online, Pick-Up In-Store) and Vehicle Routing Optimization for large fleets.

Fujitsu also will showcase how the Digital Annealer helped an automotive company optimize its US supply chain distribution for automotive parts. This use case is closely aligned with the challenge faced by retailers in optimizing supply chain inventory. The Fujitsu Digital Annealer was applied to quickly determine the best route with the lowest distribution cost for procuring parts from hundreds of suppliers and delivering them through several transit warehouses to dozens of factories. Using the newly-discovered routes proved that this solution would reduce costs by approximately 2-5% compared to conventional methods.

FUJITSU Market Place is a digital commerce platform designed to make retail simpler, more scalable, and more cost-effective while expanding in-store shopping choices and creating service opportunities for store colleagues. FUJITSU Market Place provides tangible sales benefits, giving customers options in how they shop and pay in-store. Retailers reduce operational costs by dramatically improving the checkout experience, enabling significant reduction of business overhead and providing a chance to refocus staff on maximizing shoppers’ total immersive in-store experience. During NRF Chapter 1, visitors will be able to see how FUJITSU Market Place supports non-traditional store services such as cafes, and health & beauty concessions, and centralizes and merges those revenues into a total performance view.

GLOVIA® OM Enhancements: Fujitsu makes it easier for retailers to orchestrate their inventory and orders dynamically and seamlessly regardless of the channel. There are five new solutions in the GLOVIA OM product suite – BOPIS Store Fulfillment, Inventory Management, B2B Commerce, Intelligent Order Allocation, and GLOVIA Enterprise Business Capabilities (EBC). Fujitsu GLOVIA OM is the lifeline of retail, an intelligent order orchestration hub that manages incoming demand across channels, and provides one seamless system to optimize fulfilment with unmatched transparency.

Cloud-Native In-Store Fulfillment Solution built on Salesforce® Consumer Goods Cloud: Fujitsu will feature a recently launched solution that enhances and optimizes retailers’ pick processes for online orders fulfilled from stores. The solution offers a rich set of processes and tools for associates and store managers, including Task Assignment and Management, Capacity Management, Store Pick Routing, Quality Assurance, Reporting, Communication, and Automation tools.

Fujitsu Self-Service Solutions: Fujitsu is leading the digital transformation of in-store technologies with Fujitsu S3 Self-Service Simplified. S3 solutions are modular hardware and software building blocks designed to create complete in-store solutions or augment a retailer’s existing capabilities.

oFujitsu SmartCASH: Launching today as part of S3, Fujitsu SmartCASH full recycling payment module is the most compact standard capacity cash recycler on the market today. The Fujitsu SmartCASH module is designed to be deployed quickly for in-counter Point of Sale cash automation or a complete free-standing Self-CheckOut configuration. The Fujitsu SmartCASH payment module reduces operational costs while enhancing customer experience by providing a single cash automation solution across the entire store.

oUScan® U-Shop app for Scan and Go: The Fujitsu UScan U-Shop application enables mobile Scan and Go, which can be deployed as an extension to existing UScan software customers or integrated into an existing Point of Sale/Enterprise solution.