Honeywell is laser-focused on reshaping the future of retail

For more than 40 years, Honeywell’s mobility and scanning products and solutions have helped customers to improve their retail workflow processes, thus increasing their productivity and profitability. As e-commerce is reshaping the retail, logistics and supply-chain industries, Honeywell has been adapting to customers’ evolving needs and providing innovative technologies and proven workflow solutions to help retailers and logistics companies to win.

“We are more of a technology company than an industrial company,” said Lynn Huang Freeman, head of Marketing & Strategy, APAC, Honeywell Scanning & Mobility. “Honeywell has more than 22,000 technologists worldwide including a large number of software engineers that you can match with any top IT companies.”

Asia aspirations
Since 2007, Honeywell Scanning & Mobility has been growing its strategic footprints across Asia-Pacific steadily. With six acquisitions including the recent Intermec and Datamax-O’Neil acquisitions, Honeywell Scanning & Mobility has been strengthening its product offerings and building up its solution expertise and thought leadership in the industry. This year saw Honeywell Scanning and Mobility growing significantly and moving into the next phase of expansion.

Asked about its competitive differentiator, Honeywell Scanning & Mobility may not be the only solution in the market but it is the fastest-growing company in the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) industry, according to Huang.

“We focus on offering products and solutions that meet and exceed customers’ expectations. We see a huge opportunity in the retail industry in Asia-Pacific to adopt specialised workflow solutions from the shopfront in-store management and customer engagement to backend distribution centre and warehouse management, and from direct store delivery, field services to omni-channel fulfilment. We identify the under-served market needs,” added Huang.

For Honeywell Scanning & Mobility, Asia-Pacific is an exciting region with several high growth countries. The company is committed to the AIDC industry and has been investing heavily in not only China but also India and ASEAN countries to develop local products and local talents so as to better serve the local customers. As a result, there is an increasing customer base with successful use cases. Among its satisfied customers are Tesco Thailand, The Reject Shop, Schweppes Australia, Parmalat Australia, and GraysOnline.

In addition to developing its own sales and marketing force, Honeywell Scanning & Mobility has been developing its distribution and solution partner community as well. Its newly launched partner programme — Honeywell Performance Partner Program — has seen a 20% growth of managed partners in less than six months.

Tesco Lotus Thailand – mobile retail system
One such deployment by Honeywell catering to mobile retail productivity was for Tesco Lotus Thailand. Operating for 18 years in Thailand, Tesco Lotus has 1,500 stores and 45,000 employees. It is part of Tesco UK — which owns 65,000 stores and employs 500,000 employees in 13 countries — expansion into Asia.

Tesco Lotus in Thailand operates five different types of retail stores including Plus Mall, Hypermarket, Tesco Market and Express. Tesco Lotus has been using Honeywell bar-code scanners at all its stores since 2008, including the Voyager 9590 hand-held scanner, Solaris 7820 presentation scanner, as well as the Stratos 2400 bi-optic scanner.

The rise of mobile-savvy consumers, competition and increased regulations has Tesco Lotus needing to up its game. It needed to be able to integrate its solutions with mobile-phone apps and mobile coupons, with a smartphone-ready app at its core. Tesco Lotus was also looking to transition its POS system from ID to 2D scanning, capable of reading barcodes from smartphone screens. Entered the Honeywell Xenon 1900g 2D bar code scanner.

This adoption of Honeywell’s Xenon 1900g helped Tesco Lotus to launch e-loyalty cards, mobile coupons, linked credit cards, e-wallets and more customer engagement. Customers can download the mobile coupons and redeem upon check out. Also, there is no waiting time for loyalty cards. Customers can receive their cards on the spot in the form of a bar-code on their smartphone. They also have the option to link their credit card to their e-loyalty card.

The robustness of Honeywell’s product suites allows the user to read electronic bar-codes quickly and accurately off smartphone screens despite any reflection and contrast issues — a capability not offered by all competitor scanning solutions. It can also enable hard-to-read grocery product barcodes, such as those on plastic bags or cans.

“Check-out efficiency is central to shaping a customer’s shopping experience, so Tesco Lotus was very thorough in researching the selection of the right bar code scanner,” said Saroj Prombut. “Following internal lab testing over a one-month period and on-site store testing, Honeywell Xenon 1900g stood out due to its aggressive scan performance reading a range of mobile barcodes.”

In-store testing and survey showed an 85% customer satisfaction. Tesco Lotus, a happy customer of Honeywell’s solutions, has since integrated and upgraded its scanners for its 1,200 stores in Thailand. This allows Tesco Lotus to track customers’ buying patterns, target promotions and make better marketing decisions. They have also seen increased sales since the new system implementation.

“We are very satisfied by the visible results brought by the Honeywell Xenon 1900g,” commented Prombut, IT manager of Tesco Lotus Store and Retail Service. “Tesco Lotus is dedicated to develop new innovations to be the best in our business and for our customers. Now our promise becomes true by the successful implementation of our mobile retail system supported by Honeywell Xenon 1900. We have been a loyal customer of Honeywell since 2008. Their superior product performance has really turned our ‘point- of-sale’ into ‘point-of-satisfaction’.

Thailand, a country where 70% of utility bill payments are done at convenience stores, another advancement by Tesco Lotus in the works is a development of a new ‘retail service’ system that enables its customers to pay their utility bills at Tesco Lotus stores by scanning an electronic QR bar-code from their smartphones, offering convenience and an added service.