"Few industries depend more on real-time operations than retail. Increasingly, stores are leveraging applications enabled by WLAN to improve responsiveness, expand profit margins, and, ultimately, differentiate themselves from the competition."

The Retail industry leverages a wide range of wireless applications to enable employee mobility, provide better customer service, and give critical decision-makers real-time product and inventory information. For a retailer, being able to quickly locate a specific item or know if it is out of stock is critical to ensuring customer satisfaction and continuity of business operations.

The benefits that WLAN provides to retailers include:

• Point of Sale (POS): Deployment of wireless cash registers and barcode client devices.
• Asset Location: Allow tracking of products from arrival at distribution centers to final sale, together with real-time inventory information.
• Customer Assistance: Support technologies such as customer self-help kiosks, consumer mobile devices, and personal shopper devices.
• Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN): Increase productivity by cutting customer response times and maximizing employee access to managers.

Unique Challenges of Retail

The Retail industry can use WLAN to drive results and profits, but there are specific challenges that need to be overcome, including:

• A store's retail floor can have numerous sources of wireless interference.
• Slow communication speeds will result in unhappy customers.
• Wireless systems need to be able to scale quickly and cost-effectively.
• WLAN must enable stringent security standards when customer information is transmitted.

Extricom: WLAN Architecture Built for Retail

 

CORE REQUIREMENTS			EXTRICOM UNIQUE VALUE
Reliable, Comprehensive Communications: WLAN must be highly reliable. Otherwise, connectivity outages will directly impact employee productivity and enterprise profitability.			Guaranteed Service: Extricom WLAN technology delivers a guaranteed and consistent data rate throughout the coverage area.
Support Highly Mobile Workforce: Solution must meet performance needs of continually mobile employees without roaming and re-authentication issues.			Multi-Layer Channel Blanket: Unique infrastructure provides maximum bandwidth, mobility, and coverage to each individual employee.
Wire-Like VoWLAN: VoWLAN is an increasingly critical tool, and must operate flawlessly, with toll-quality audio.			Zero-Latency, Seamless Mobility: Extricom WLAN is purpose-built for the industry's best voice over Wi-Fi communication.
Ease of Use: Stores change their physical layouts almost as often as they change their product lines, so quick installation to meet changing space needs, and the ability to handle a dynamic RF environment are critical.			The Lowest Cost of Ownership: Extricom's solution eliminates the cost of RF cell planning, and is deployed and maintained with plug-and-play simplicity, resulting in 50% lower TCO than competing solutions
User Security: Maintaining the security of customer information is of paramount importance.			Secure and Convenient: Extricom embeds the strongest security available, without sacrificing mobility or performance.

The Future of Wi-Fi

Major Retailers clearly see the importance of Wi-Fi to their business success. The question is: how confident is your company's IT staff that today's technologies can meet the current and future demands on your environment?

Ask us how retail enterprises have succeeded with Extricom. Extricom's Wireless LAN is specifically designed to answer the challenges posed by pervasive Wi-Fi, providing the high-performance, resilient, and future-proof infrastructure they require.

For more information on how an Extricom WLAN can help you achieve your goals, fill out our contact form or visit the Products section of Extricom's website.