ReThink Productivity Podcast
In this exciting podcast, Simon Hedaux from ReThink Productivity shares his insights and strategies for improving productivity and efficiency in the retail and hospitality industries. With the help of clients, partners, and the ReThink team, Simon covers everything from measuring and tracking productivity to developing and implementing effective strategies.
Whether you're a business owner, manager, or employee, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone who wants to learn how to get more done and improve their bottom line.
Here's what you can expect to learn:
- How to measure and track productivity
- Proven strategies for improving efficiency and reducing waste
- How to create a culture of productivity and innovation
- Tips for motivating and engaging your team
- Real-world examples of how other businesses have used ReThink Productivity to achieve success
Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from the experts and get ahead of the curve with your own business.
ReThink Productivity Podcast
Retail Technology Show 2025 Review
The ReThink team shares fresh insights from the Retail Technology Show 2025 at the Excel in London, where AI applications in retail have evolved beyond marketing buzzwords to practical implementations in forecasting, computer vision, and data mining.
• AI usage becoming more sophisticated with specific applications rather than just marketing claims
• Computer vision technology now identifying shoplifting, tracking store traffic, and creating heat maps of customer movement
• Surprising amount of cash handling technology despite declining cash transactions
• RFID innovations eliminating manual scanning with fixed readers tracking merchandise throughout stores
• Footfall tracking systems can detect mobile phones even when powered off
• Stock management systems now prompting intelligent markdowns to reduce waste
• Employee communication platforms continuing to evolve for frontline worker engagement
• Notable absence of customer experience measurement technologies and concrete ROI metrics
Join us for our upcoming forum on September 11th in Birmingham featuring an innovation lounge with exciting tech partners, and catch us at NRF Europe in Paris the following week.
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Welcome to the Productivity Podcast. This is a bonus episode as we return from the Retail Technology Show in Excel last week at the time of recording, Delighted to welcome Sue and James Boll who were on the stand and hopefully his feet have cooled down like mine, Hi both.
Speaker 2:Hi Simon.
Speaker 1:So interesting show First year at the excel as it moved from olympia. James, do you want to talk us through your thoughts, as you kind of cast your mind back to last week and some of the things that, um, maybe brought on some light bulbs or caused curiosity?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, this was a. This was a great experience for me this year. It was my second retail technology show and therefore I had a little bit better idea what to expect this year than last year and I have to say the show didn't disappoint. There were two areas I was particularly interested in. One was AI how much people were talking about having AI and the other was some general innovations. We spent some time going around the Innovation Award winners at the show and there were some really neat ideas, I think, on display there. On top of that, I felt like it was just a great opportunity to network with clients and potential clients strangers and just get together and see what the temperature of the industry was. So, yeah, I really enjoyed it overall.
Speaker 1:And Sue your initial reflections.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I thought the venue. It was good to have more space. It felt like there was a bit more room to breathe and it's got very cramped at the last venue, so it was good to have that. Yeah, as James said, it's always good to catch up with lots of familiar faces, whether that's clients that we've worked with, other vendors, people that have swapped jobs and are doing something different that you get a chance to catch up with. So, yeah, it's always good to go along and see people yeah, agreed, like the like.
Speaker 1:The new venue took a bit of getting used to as we got into a tried and trusted routine in the old one, but relatively straightforward, which is good. So let's start with the big one. Then let's start with ai. I think we talked on this kind of review last year around lots of ai badges, lots of ai words on stands, I think so you, you feel it's progressed a little bit more this year yeah, there still is that ai marketing element where and in some cases it can still be a technology in search of something to do with it.
Speaker 3:But actually I think we're starting to see some good use cases come through now. So, um, people are using it for forecasting in quite interesting ways. So, whether that's planning specialist resource, um applying it to uh stock and that sort of thing. So I think there's some genuine uh use cases. It feels like people are being relatively quiet about them still, but as you kind of dig into it a bit, you start to think that there is some really interesting stuff starting to happen and james, does that?
Speaker 1:do you share that view? Have you seen lots of uh development in that area, on the stands and from all the people you were speaking to?
Speaker 2:yeah, in addition to what to what sue said, I saw a bit more use of computer vision this year, um, or at least openly shared, more than last year.
Speaker 2:So some people who are using computer vision on cct CCTV to make heat maps of where customers and staff were standing to actually point, looking at CCTV cameras that were pointing at the doors to count footfall going past the store, which was interesting, and also some facial recognition and some really neat computer vision stuff to identify when people were putting things in their pockets.
Speaker 2:So there was, you know, there was one system where the computer could tell if someone was shoplifting and could send an alert to a security center and record the face so they could go on a register for the security team in future. So yeah, I thought there were some real, specific use cases that might add value for retailers and not just kind of whizzy things people have developed for the sake of it. There are also a couple of examples of rapid data mining where people were taking data and analyzing it kind of in real. The ai was analyzing it in real time to generate new insights, which I thought was really powerful. So yeah, I think a lot more specific application this year than last year that's good to see.
Speaker 1:I think we were skeptical last year, weren't we, of the marketing angle over the, the proof in the pudding.
Speaker 3:So good to see that's come through and be interesting to see where it's at next year. Because if you think I mean typically within uh tech world, as you learn stuff, it kind of grows exponentially. So I think there should be some really interesting stuff on it this time next year yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:People not just saying oh, we've got ai, but saying we use ai to do x, y and z and actually marketing the the benefits rather than the feature yeah, yeah, lots, lots of cool stuff.
Speaker 1:Um, I was having some interesting conversations around using ai to forecast opening hours in light of making sure you're you're open at the right time with ed and the team at solved by ai. So lots going on that space, lots of interesting conversation. I think you mentioned off air, so it feels also a little bit like some people are keeping it close to their chest. They think they maybe got the, the golden or the silver bullet and they don't want to share it yet yes, yeah so that that's ai good, good to see it moving forward.
Speaker 1:A couple of things that surprised me uh, the amount of hardware, I suppose, and a bit of technology that was there around cash. Now lots of coffee shops are now cashless and others wanting to deal less with cash, so I was surprised that there was that much still there around cash. Do you agree, sue?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's surprising when you think that you know cash is. It keeps dropping all the time, doesn't it? And there's conversations at the moment about should the limit of what you can put through on a card be increased as well? So I guess for businesses that do continue to use it, then there's you do have to have efficient ways to handle it, and there's no doubt there is some smart equipment for kind of automatic counting and all that sort of thing. So perhaps it'll be with us longer than we think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe that's just my view, but yeah, surprised by that, Saw all the usual workforce management vendors there. So good to catch up with everybody on the stand and see how their technology again is starting to leverage AI in a more detailed way. For the forecasting piece, James, we looked at some interesting RFID technology, didn't we?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was one business in particular, I recall, that was using fixed RFID scanners, so people didn't need to use handhelds, so you could tell where any stock was in the store at any time and actually see how it moved around, which was interesting, and it felt like that technology was potentially kind of moving on to be a bit more sophisticated. I don't know what you felt, simon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. From removing the manual process of having to wand everything, it does it itself which kind of links into the other one.
Speaker 2:We saw James on the footfall counting that didn't need any, uh, any install, which which kind of freaked me a little bit. Yeah, well, I mean this. This was a, an organization that was using um pings from mobile phones kernel layers to to see how many mobile phones were in um in different areas. So a bit of an insight there, in that your location be tracked even if your mobile phone's turned off. But actually potentially powerful, potentially a very powerful solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely yeah. Yeah, that worried me a little bit that they could not there, but you can get the location of your phone even when it's off. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Stock management. So lots on prompted markdowns, intelligent markdowns, reducing waste. And, sue, that's probably one of the big things left for retailers to tackle, isn't? It is well one the stock management piece, but within that the whole markdown piece.
Speaker 3:If you've got date-sensitive product, yeah, yes, and if you think about the journey that a lot of retailers have been on, where the things that took time were taking cash from customers, and self-checkouts made a big difference there we're seeing increasing adoption of electronic shelf edge labels, so that whole pricing piece and maintaining things has gone down. So the bits that are left are the physical putting stuff on the shelf, putting stuff on the shelf and then it's very time consuming to be doing markdowns, especially if you're doing two or three cycles of it during the day. It can become kind of a full-time job for somebody, or even more in a bigger supermarket or whatever. So really interesting to see those developments around prompting markdowns so you know when stuff is going out of date prompting lockdowns so you know when stuff is going out of date.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And last but not least, lots on colleague comms. So again been a theme really since lockdown, where there was that recognition of how do you, how do you reach people that work in a store other than the leadership team. So lots around the comms and engagement apps. Spent some time with the team at work jam looking at those points. You know, task training, frontline comms so a really interesting piece that's opening up to many more user cases linking to WFM, hr systems etc. So always good to see where the development's going there. Any other bits that you've thought of, sue, that we didn't cover in my list there?
Speaker 3:no I don't think so. They're the things that I that struck me while I was there good james anything from you.
Speaker 2:Well, there were two things. One was something we remarked upon at the time, which was, um, the absence of many people talking about the customer experience, um, particularly around customer experience measurement. We talked to one one guy from a startup that had won an innovation award. He was using AI to mine data on the fly, which was interesting, but you would think, potentially, how you differentiate your customer experience might also, and how you can use tech to do that and measure the impacts might be on people's minds. So I was surprised there wasn't much of that there. And the second thing was obviously it's a point that James BW, our colleague, made about all of these things, which is everybody was claiming a return on investment, but of course, you actually need to get in and measure how much time you're saving with some of these things and how, um how, people didn't seem to be talking to us as much as they could have about that. So that was. That was something else I guess I would know yeah, that's a fair point, um.
Speaker 1:So we're going back next year, which is is good for us, good for them, good if you want to come and speak to us. Not so good if you don't want to come and speak to us. Um, but a couple of key events that are coming up. So we've got our forum on the 11th of September in Birmingham so you can register on the website if you've not already. And we've got our innovation line this year where we've got some exciting tech partners that are doing some cool stuff that you'll be able to have a chat with. And then we'll also be at NRF Europe, which is in Paris the week after. So lots to come. Keep an eye out on the website for details and our socials. And, james sue, thanks very much. We'll catch up soon bye thank you.
