Big Brother goes green

Technology comes in for some stick for allowing people to snoop on others. Whether its e-mail, Web monitoring or even CCTV, technology's use often comes with negative connotations, says Retail Week.

So it has been great to hear in the past week from a retailer that is placing monitoring and intelligent technologies at the heart of its plans to get greener.

Tesco already uses a transport tracking system, but at last week's Retail Technology conference at Retail Solutions, it revealed plans to take its use of intelligent technologies a step further. Tesco group technology and architecture director Mike Yorwerth said that the grocer is investigating centralised building management systems.

Australian retail food brand manager and franchisor Retail Food Group is deploying over 1 000 NCR RealPOS point-of-sale (POS) touch screen terminals, reports Aus Food News.

The high-tech terminals, which integrate NCR's POS terminals with Task Retail Technology's Xchangexec software suite, allow for the creation of "bounce back" vouchers by individual stores, customised in-store promotions, product ordering by cellphone text messaging and real-time Internet-based reporting of individual store and overall company performance.

All four of RFG's brands - Donut King, Michel's Patisserie, Brumby's Bakeries and BB's cafe - will utilise the technology.

TAKE Solutions, a Chennai-based business and technology solutions company in supply chain management (SCM) and life sciences, is exploring the possibility of tapping into the Indian retail SCM space, where it sees a huge traction in the coming two to three years, says Business Standard India.

The company says Indian retail is still evolving from stage one (companies making shopfronts better) to stage two (managing better optimisation).

It expects to see more action and enormous response to its SCM products in 2009-10 when retail companies start moving to stage three - deploying solutions for movement optimisation.