The family-owned supermarket group Colruyt has announced that it will equip all staff in its 220 Belgian stores with new mobile technology which will help with logistics and customer service.
"Personal Digital Assistants," or PDAs, have been rolled out in all stores in its home-market thus far, albeit in limited numbers. Colruyt say that they will increase the number of PDAs from 900 to 8,000 by October of this year.
In a statement released by the company, Colruyt said that by familiarising staff with the new technology, it will optimise its work processes.
It hopes that stock-checking will will more accurate, and that more customers will be served. "Every employee that has a PDA can introduce their stock counts at any time. The price-tag-scanner is there to check if the shelf price and the cash match," said Tom De Bock of Colruyt Zelzate.
"In one month, we were able to double the price controls in our store, 11,000 in total. "
Colruyt is also currently developing new applications for the PDA. In the future, employees will have in-store access to all product information, so that customers can be kept up to date with relative ease. Colruyt say that the PDA will act as a mobile phone device, allowing workers to communicate from different locations.
"All these applications reduce the distances unnecessarily travelled by staff and we save time," Bart Rutsaert, manager at Colruyt Lochristi told Belgian trade magazine Gondola.
© 2014 - European Supermarket Magazine by Enda Dowling
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