Lenovo Smarter IoT Solutions To Help Retailers Improve Productivity and Store Safety ⋆

Lenovo Smarter IoT Solutions To Help Retailers Improve Productivity and Store Safety

Lenovo announced a set of ThinkIoT Smarter Store Solutions to help “brick-and-mortar” stores adapt to thrive in today’s new normal environment. The solutions improve the customer experience by enabling better inventory availability and product interaction while simultaneously driving labor efficiency. Lenovo Smarter IoT Solutions

Additionally, these solutions help to make stores safer for shoppers during COVID-19, giving them confidence during this upcoming holiday season. This announcement extends Lenovo’s expertise in smart retail, providing retailers with a complete set of solutions from the front-of-store to the sales floor and the back-of-store.

A recent Lenovo survey found that nearly half of consumers reported that they began shopping online more frequently over the past month, and 66 percent said it’s the retailer’s responsibility to keep them healthy while they shop in-store. For in-store shopping, their top concerns are: finding product availability; ensuring mask policies are in place; and occupancy levels. When it comes to future store experiences enabled through technology, they’re most excited about greater transparency about product availability, targeting advertising for relevant deals, and ensuring prices are updated correctly.

“Brick-and-mortar retailers offer a unique experience for shoppers that cannot be fully replicated online,” said John Gordon, President, CIoT Business Group, Lenovo. “With ThinkIoT Smarter Store Solutions, we’re helping these important retail businesses create even more differentiated customer experiences while improving their bottom line so they can continue to grow during challenging economic times.”

ThinkIoT Smarter Store Solutions offer end-to-end, pre-tested, and validated IoT solutions to address key customer experience, productivity, and safety needs of stores. By working with proven hardware and software partners, including Avalue, L Squared, Spacee, and Viper Imaging, ThinkIoT Smarter Store Solutions helps store operations leaders:

Create a smarter shopping experience by:

Bringing in new customers: Increase store visits through targeted advertising and tracking of in-store marketing effectiveness through custom QR codes from customized digital displays. (Avalue)
Driving inventory productivity: Make inventory management more efficient with out-of-stock detection, inventory counts, and planogram compliance by leveraging smart shelves and smart pushers. (Spacee)
Increasing customer purchase rate: Let customers learn about products in a dynamic and self-service way using smart displays with interactive product information and tailored ads. (Avalue)

Make shopping spaces safer by: Lenovo Solutions

Identifying potentially sick employees proactively: Use FDA-certified temperature screening to help keep sick employees from entering the store (Viper Imaging)
Enabling policy communication: Communicate policy changes, mask requirements, and occupancy levels to customers simply and easily with digital signs (L Squared)

Customers can pick their set of solutions based on what’s most important to them. Lenovo serves as the one-stop shop for these practical ThinkIoT Smarter Store solutions, providing validation, deployment, and management, which is especially important to simplify the complexity of large retailers with stores distributed across regions and countries.

Lenovo’s ThinkIoT Smarter Store Solutions are backed by:

Validation processes for software solutions include up to 140 steps covering security, serviceability, scalability, and reliability
A field network of more than 20,000 technicians for global deployment
Customers in more than 180 markets and expertise supporting more than 125 million devices

Lenovo’s ThinkIoT Smarter Retail Solutions complement Lenovo’s other Smart Retail solutions, helping create an ecosystem of interoperable technology and aggregated data to transform business. With a customized, integrated network of smart retail solutions, store-wide IT management is simplified and improved.

For example, Lenovo’s turnkey POS and self-service kiosk solutions help retailers grow beyond siloed digital point tools to unlock data and insights, as well as reduce the hardware footprint and expense through connected self-service solutions. In addition, Lenovo AI Innovation Centers can help optimize the business with analytics and machine learning capabilities to understand customer behavior, reduce shrinkage, and meet complex logistics and inventory challenges.

A diverse team of engineers, designers, and developers located in countries including China, India, and the U.S. brought these solutions to market and created them in a near-100 percent remote working environment.