BT Expedite drafts in grocery expertise

BT Expedite have announced that they have hired two high flyers from Tesco and Somerfield, as part of its strategy to further expand into the food and convenience markets. BT are already well established in the retail sector providing electronic point of sale (EPOS) and back-office software applications.

Richard Dodd joins the BT Expedite board from Tesco. He will take up the role of grocery practice director from November 2007. Most recently at Tesco, Dodd led the team that developed the model for Tesco's International Store Operation defining processes and systems key to their successful expansion into Asia, Central Europe and the US. He will play a leading role in shaping the grocery practice within BT which has been further strengthened by the recent joint alliance with Retalix Ltd who provide software systems to the grocery sector.

Darrell Maton has also joined BT Expedite and brings with him a wealth of experience in the grocery market place. He will be focused on ensuring retailers receive full value from the new grocery proposition. Maton joins from Somerfield where he was responsible for their store strategy and the interface between business users and IT, and brings with him 21 years of retail experience.

BT's new grocery proposition will enable food and convenience retailers to source their store infrastructure, applications, communications, hardware, and services, including integration, roll-out, training and support, from a single supplier.

www.bt.com/aboutbt

Mole Valley Farmers consolidates storage

Mole Valley Farmers, a Devon-based rural co-operative and retailer, has selected BakBone Software's NetVault: Backup solution to consolidate its fragmented storage infrastructure and ensure future data protection for its 40 sites across the south of the UK. The solution was provided by independent reseller ITPS, based in the North East of England.

Mole Valley Farmers has 1,200 employees operating from over 40 sites with a retail operation offering over 22,000 products of both own-label and national brands. As a result of their growth, the co-operative today has a geographically dispersed multi-vendor IT infrastructure whose key challenges included back-ups management and the lack of offsite replication capabilities.

'Our backups to tape used to take place overnight and this process was not only time consuming but it also lacked the flexibility we required,' said Andrew Chapple, Mole Valley Farmers' Company Secretary. 'We therefore decided to consolidate our storage and automate the backup process; whatever solution we went with, it would need to work in a heterogeneous environment and we knew this would not be an easy search.'

The co-operative uses NetVault: Backup to backup 5 TB of data warehousing, Windows Exchange, and core business system data to Direct Attach Storage (DAS) through a single point of management and administration; the data is then copied to tape for archival purposes. A Storage Area Network (SAN) is planned for the core business systems and the data warehouse in the near future to consolidate the storage infrastructure.

www.bakbone.com

Galeria Kaufhof trials magicmirror

The Galeria Kaufhof department store in Essen, Germany is trialling Avery Dennison's magicmirror product information system as part of a large-scale radio-frequency identification (RFID) field trial.

The magicmirror system has been developed jointly by thebigspace, a company specialising in innovative experience design concepts, and the Avery Dennison owned Paxar Corporation, a leader in the field of RFID technology. A RFID system enables data and images to be transmitted to the surface of the mirror, providing the fashion consumer with additional product information.

The system is being used in conjunction with the Gardeur clothing brand. When a customer tries on a pair of trousers from this range or holds the item in front of the mirror, information about the characteristics of the garment and care instructions are projected onto the surface of the mirror. Members of staff are able to use their mobile hand-held scanners to check quickly and simply the availability of other sizes and colours, either on the shop floor or in the warehouse.

Avery Dennison has provided its Monarch 9855 RFMP ME printer, to print the necessary RFID labels. This device operates in UHF Gen2 mode with 868 megahertz, printing and encoding both RFID hangtags and adhesive labels with integrated chips. The Monarch 9855 resad and encodes RFID tags in line with the UHF protocol Gen2 according to European specifications. It also prints barcodes and other visual information.

www.ris.averydennison.com

Online customer experience research

According to Webcredible's annual benchmark study of online customer experience, The Online High Street, 50% of the UK's best known high street names are offering a poorer standard of online service to customers than the same period last year. Overall, 55% of the retailers assessed dropped within the rankings compared to 2006 results.

With an average usability score of only 57%, these retailers will doubtlessly be losing site visitors due to mistakes that could easily be avoided. Basic rules of good usability are often being ignored, leading to increasing frustration amongst consumers trying to find, view and pay for merchandise. Hidden delivery costs, confusing check-out procedures and repeated error pages are contributing towards a poor customer experience online.

There is good news for gamers and CD lovers though as HMV tops the rankings this year, achieving the highest score of 70 out of 100 and Game climbs from 18th place last year to 2nd in the rankings this year, improving its scoring from 35 to 66. Other positive news showed that last year's lowest score of 25 has increased to 47, indicating that although the number of websites offering a good standard of customer experience has dropped, there are fewer exceptionally poor customer experiences.

"High street retail sales growth is at its slowest rate since 1947; however, demand for internet shopping is at an all time high. You'd think that retailers would be investing in developing and improving the customer experience that they offer online, however a surprising trend this year shows that the quality of user experience is significantly down amongst last year's high fliers," comments Trenton Moss, director of Webcredible.

The criteria used to evaluate the websites take into account the complete ecommerce experience, including browsing and navigation, the checkout process, searching and product display pages. A full copy of the report can be downloaded from www.webcredible.co.uk/ecommerce2007