Retail

Typical retail store operations lose between 10% and 15% of their rugged mobile device estate every single year.

The replacement device cost alone in a 5000-device estate is between £200K and £400K per annum, and as most estates cycle every 5 years that’s between £1M and £2M over that period of time – and we haven’t even dialled in the operational and management costs associated with managing that process, nor the time spent trying to locate missing Zebra devices or other rugged retail devices such as Honeywell and Datalogic.

There is another hidden cost of using shared devices that is even more frightening, the cost of issuing these out and tracking their return every single time they are used in a 7-day week retail operation. This cost starts with a retail colleague trying to find a spare device, then understanding if it’s in working condition, logging in to it when they think it’s working and then logging out (if they remember) and then putting it back somewhere so it can be charged fully (unless another colleague picks it up in the meantime of course and walks away with an under charged device).

Let’s move to retail DC operations. The numbers are the same for missing devices (10%-15%) but we can be a little more informed around the downtime associated with the issuing out and return of a rugged device - an absolute min of 4 mins per user every shift.

An estate of 1000 devices means that’s £350K P.A. assuming just one shift and a 7-day working week.

Waizu Device Finder and Waizu Device Insights combine to create a solution that can dramatically reduce these operational costs and add significant sums back in to your operational budget. Our solution resolves these issues by dramatically speeding up the issue and receipt back of rugged mobile devices, and reducing the number of lost/missing devices by quickly identifying those that are in a potentially lost state and providing tools that can enable a very quick recovery.

Additionally, our battery management features ensure colleagues always know that they are picking up a device that will last a shift. These tools can also monitor individual batteries, indicating those that need replacement today and, at the time of standard 3 year whole estate battery, those that are still healthy and actually do NOT need replacement.

Find out more here.

Our typical payback period is 14 to 20 weeks and Waizu starts delivering real savings the moment you switch our solution on.

Recently, one high street retailer defined their Waizu solution as ‘process cost critical’ on the basis of its impact on reduced downtime within just ten days of implementation in their distribution centre.