Zebra's Industry Solutions can give your business a competitive advantage by connecting people, assets and data to help you make better decisions.
Scale and energise your retail strategy with a digital backbone that unifies your team, informs priorities and drives results with Zebra's retail technology solutions.
Zebra's healthcare technology solutions provide patient identity management, mobile health devices, and business intelligence data to improve efficiency.
Zebra’s manufacturing technology solutions enable manufacturers to become more agile, optimise plant floor performance and embrace market changes.
Zebra's market-leading solutions and products improve customer satisfaction with a lower cost per interaction by keeping service representatives connected with colleagues, customers, management and the tools they use to satisfy customers across the supply chain.
In today's world, the demands on transportation and logistics companies are higher than ever. Dedicated Warehouse, Fleet and Delivery, and Yard and Terminal solutions enable visibility to every aspect of your business and keep operations running flawlessly around the clock.
Zebra's hospitality technology solutions equip your hotel and restaurant staff to deliver superior customer and guest service through inventory tracking and more.
Empower your field workers with purpose-driven mobile technology solutions to help them capture and share critical data in any environment.
Zebra’s mobile computing, scanning, and printing solutions connect each operational area in your warehouse to give you the agility to realize transformational gains.
Zebra's range of mobile computers equip your workforce with the devices they need from handhelds and tablets to wearables and vehicle-mounted computers.
Zebra's desktop, mobile, industrial, and portable printers for barcode labels, receipts, RFID tags and cards give you smarter ways to track and manage assets.
Zebra's 1D and 2D corded and cordless barcode scanners anticipate any scanning challenge in a variety of environments, whether retail, healthcare, T&L or manufacturing.
Zebra's extensive range of RAIN RFID readers, antennas, and printers give you consistent and accurate tracking.
Choose Zebra's reliable barcode, RFID and card supplies carefully selected to ensure high performance, print quality, durability and readability.
Zebra's location technologies provide real-time tracking for your organisation to better manage and optimise your critical assets and create more efficient workflows.
Zebra's rugged tablets and 2-in-1 laptops are thin and lightweight, yet rugged to work wherever you do on familiar and easy-to-use Windows or Android OS.
With Zebra's family of fixed industrial scanners and machine vision technologies, you can tailor your solutions to your environment and applications.
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Zebra's OEM scan engines, imagers, and private label OEM products offer flexible integration and help enhance product development with modern OEM technology.
Zebra's environmental sensors monitor temperature-sensitive products, offering data insights on environmental conditions across industry applications.
Keep labour costs low, your talent happy and your organisation compliant. Create an agile operation that can navigate unexpected schedule changes and customer demand to drive sales, satisfy customers and improve your bottom line.
Empower the front line with prioritised task notification and enhanced communication capabilities for easier collaboration and more efficient task execution.
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RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
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Advance your digital transformation and execute your strategic plans with the help of the right location and tracking technology.
The Zebra Aurora suite of machine vision software enables users to solve their track-and-trace, vision inspection and industrial automation needs.
Zebra Aurora Focus brings a new level of simplicity to controlling enterprise-wide manufacturing and logistics automation solutions. With this powerful interface, it’s easy to set up, deploy and run Zebra’s Fixed Industrial Scanners and Machine Vision Smart Cameras, eliminating the need for different tools and reducing training and deployment time.
Aurora Imaging Library™, formerly Matrox Imaging Library, machine-vision software development kit (SDK) has a deep collection of tools for image capture, processing, analysis, annotation, display, and archiving. Code-level customization starts here.
Aurora Design Assistant™, formerly Matrox Design Assistant, integrated development environment (IDE) is a flowchart-based platform for building machine vision applications, with templates to speed up development and bring solutions online quicker.
Designed for experienced programmers proficient in vision applications, Aurora Vision Library provides the same sophisticated functionality as our Aurora Vision Studio software but presented in programming language.
Aurora Vision Studio, an image processing software for machine & computer vision engineers, allows quick creation, integration & monitoring of powerful OEM vision applications.
Adding innovative tech is critical to your success, but it can be complex and disruptive. Professional Services help you accelerate adoption, and maximise productivity without affecting your workflows, business processes and finances.
Zebra's Managed Service delivers worry-free device management to ensure ultimate uptime for your Zebra Mobile Computers and Printers via dedicated experts.
Find ways you can contact Zebra Technologies’ Support, including Email and Chat, ask a technical question or initiate a Repair Request.
Zebra's Circular Economy Program helps you manage today’s challenges and plan for tomorrow with smart solutions that are good for your budget and the environment.
Predictive analytics is leveraging historical data and business trends to anticipate the probability of certain scenarios occurring, ideally helping to estimate the likelihood of a future outcome based on historical data patterns.
There are actually four types of analytics starting with Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. In simplest terms, descriptive analytics is “what happened”, diagnostic analytics is “why did it happen”, predictive analytics is “what will happen” and prescriptive analytics (actionable intelligence) is “what should I do”. Technically all four types analyze large volumes of data to identify business trends and “events” that could impact business decisions.
However, predictive analytics requires users or workers to understand and know how to interpret “the future”. Whereas, actionable intelligence is analytics for everyone (including those at the edge) with a focus on future performance through identifying controllable factors and providing actionable opportunities that deliver results.
Actionable intelligence is one of the most advanced forms of business analytics. It uses machine learning and pattern detection rules and algorithms to identify anomalies in a company’s operations – and then prescribes a corrective action to optimize the outcome. That last part is what makes actionable intelligence so valuable: it can intelligently prescribe the action for someone to take to optimize for a particular business outcome.
It can analyze a company’s data and tell them:
Learn more about Actionable Intelligence in our dedicated What Is Actionable Intelligence FAQ.
Predictive Analytics is an analytics model which takes into account patterns in historical data and historical timelines to inform you and predict what will happen next, whereas Actionable Intelligence simulates different actions that you could take based on a goal that you want to achieve (e.g. increase sales, reduce shrink) to discover the most optimized outcome.
Real-life examples of how predictive and actionable intelligence can be used are:
A clothing retailer used actionable intelligence and pragmatic AI to identify and resolve a unique return opportunity. A new product was experiencing a high rate of returns across the majority of stores in the initial days of sales, plus a high rate of damaged product. This opportunity was sent to the merchant with the recommendations to (1) evaluate the product quality, (2) check the label, and (3) contact the vendor for an allowance increase or replacement product. It turned out that the product was missing the correct washing instructions on the care label; the actual instructions on the label would damage the item. As a result, an action was created for the stores to attach an updated garment-care label to the remaining affected merchandise. A similar notification was sent to the manufacturer with the correct care instructions. Ultimately, product returns fell 78 percent in the weeks following corrective action and these actions helped save the style.
A retailer used actionable intelligence to identify a significant spike in large-egg damages in a subset of stores within a specific region. The merchandising department contacted the vendor to find out why this was happening. It turned out that the vendor had suffered a fire at the plant that produced the large-egg cartons, so they began using medium ones to ship out the large eggs. These cartons were too small, causing additional friction that damaged the large eggs. Without identifying and correcting the anomaly, the grocer may never have realized the excess damages, nor would it have been able to trace the root cause and secure a credit from its vendor.
A fashion retailer used actionable intelligence to successfully reduce aged inventory and increase sales by offering near end-of-season items to households that matched the style and age range of a likely buyer based on loyal household buying patterns. For example, a targeted promotion could be sent for a white skirt offered to a 25-30 year old female at a 30% discount, enticing her to come into the store to take action now and she’ll be able to wear the skirt through the end of the summer. Without actionable intelligence, a lot of retailers wait and then discount the item at 75% off for everyone and hope that same female shopper comes in, but now they’ve lost profits.
A prescriptive-action pattern identified a specific product that had a higher Cost to Serve (cost to get the product to the customer within the promised timeframe). The opportunity was sent to the DC to resolve. They quickly noted that the products in question were purchased in a unit of measurement and with packaging that did not align with the customer demand or DC processing. The action taken was to notify the buyer to create orders specific to eCommerce. This improved the DC’s fulfillment speed. Communication across channels improves performance!
A retailer used pragmatic AI with actionable intelligence to identify that when specific shoppers purchased broccoli they also purchase bananas. This finding was communicated to the enterprise along with prescriptive actions to capitalize on this finding. Store managers were instructed to reorganize displays so the bananas and broccoli were the appropriate distance apart to increase baskets that included bananas and to also help drive up impulse buys.
A large retailer with a popular loyalty card program used actionable intelligence to uncover an issue they weren’t even aware was a problem. Leveraging analytics, they were able to discover a trend that shoppers were cheating their reward points for free rewards. Their retailer’s previous system did not monitor points scanning until the end of each day, so if a customer brought their receipt to multiple stores in a single day, it was easy to receive many times more reward points than were due. The actionable intelligence solution caught the recurrence and recommended real-time tracking to ensure receipts could only be scanned once for points, saving as much as $100 per shopper, means millions to the bottom line.
Actionable intelligence was used by a retailer to identify stores with a high rate of single-item transactions, as well as the associates that were driving this behavior. An opportunity was sent to the stores to reschedule these associates with associates who regularly rang multiple items per transaction, so associates would learn how to upsell. The results were an immediate uptick in sales, items per transaction, and peer-peer training. A big win-win for the organization.
A grocer had a consistent shopper base that made one large shopping trip ($120+) and one or more smaller trips per week. When a competitor moved in close by, the grocer experienced a drop in the smaller, supplemental trips. With actionable intelligence, the grocer identified the households that had stopped making the smaller trips, as well as the particular items they were buying elsewhere (i.e. meat or vegetables). With this information, the retailer was able to send targeted offers to those households, encouraging them to return. Ultimately the retailer won back many of those customers, leading to increased profits.
These are just a few examples of how retail leaders can use practical AI to look critically at business operations and take action to realize returns. Whether there are delays in shipping, customer complaints on product durability, or a seemingly isolated incident of broken merchandise, practical AI and actionable intelligence go beyond complicated tables of data to give actionable insights. Through that lens, pragmatic AI is the natural next step for analytics adoption.
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