News

Spar Austria aims to operate its digital services on a uniform platform. To this end, the group’s in-house IT department Spar ICS has set up project Snowball. It is set to migrate business-critical applications to the geo-redundant Platform as a Service (PaaS) HPE Greenlake. The cloud platform from Hewlett Packard Enterprise will gradually replace Spar’s existing data centre infrastructure. The…

This week, the retail company Georg Jos. Kaes began its announced trial of various checkout methods with Wanzl, Shopreme, DRS, and Zebra at its V-Mart in the Euro-Industriepark in Munich. The Retail Optimiser was there for the premiere.

Edeka Group has rolled out new pick-by-voice technology to the logistics centres from six of its seven regional companies. For order picking, employees now wear Lydia Voice Wear smart vests. Logistics solutions specialist Ehrhardt Partner Group (EPG) implemented both hardware and software.

Kesko Senukai will equip all 94 of its Senukai-DIY stores with electronic shelf labels from Vusion. The leading DIY retailer in the three Baltic states, which is operated as a joint venture between Finnish retail giant Kesko and the Rakauskas family, is also testing Vusion's Captana solution for automatic inventory control using shelf cameras and computer vision.

Longchamp is revamping its order management with solutions from omnichannel specialist OneStock. With this step, the French fashion company aims to optimise the customer journey across all sales channels and support its growth plans.

Amazon is closing all of its physical Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh retail outlets. Other retailers are also backing away from scanless stores. The technologies had fallen into disrepute after it became apparent that they did not always work automatically.

JD Sports has signed a multi-year global Software-as-a-Service agreement with RFID specialist Checkpoint. The British sportswear retailer will initially use cloud-based RFID inventory management software ItemOptix at all its European stores, and later worldwide. With the move, JD Sports aims to increase product availability and make more accurate, data-driven decisions.

Drugstore operator dm is planning an additional small item distribution centre at its logistics site in Wustermark near Berlin, which will use robotics from Austrian specialist TGW Logistics for picking. With the Pickcenter Rovoflex, TGW offers a new type of automatic picking system with six-axis robots that continuously improves its own work through AI.

With the rebranding to Vusion (without “Group”), the specialist for the digitalisation of physical retail outlets wants to herald a new era: instead of just implementing the Connected Store as before, Vusion now wants to enable retailers to create the AI-native Store.

Both Walmart and Carrefour announced this week that they are joining Google's new standard for agentic commerce, the Universal Commerce Protocol (UPC). The technology allows consumers to purchase products directly on Google's Gemini AI platform, for example, without having to switch to the retailer's website. At the NRF conference, which took place in New York City this week, Google Cloud…