Retail Environment Discloses a Place for the

¶ … retail environment discloses a place for the retail business and the retailers to have the ability to interconnect real-time in order to modernize transactions and re-stocking. Walmart is one of those businesses that is heading towards a technologically progressive direction with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). Any machine or person with equipment to read these tags can read from more than a few meters away.

In the situation of a retail store, the point that anything from inventory that was purchased by a customer, could be read by the RFID tag, and then subtracted from inventory helps keep things in Walmart organized and flowing. Additionally, when the catalogue reaches a predetermined quantity-on-hand - it gets reordered to maintain adequate stock for the stores. Cross (2007), discusses in an article the effectiveness of such operations. "Benefits of VoiceLogistics together with U.S.

Foodservice Inc.'s annual business strategy incorporate five goals including growth on profitable sales, improved gross profit, controlled operating expense, improved working capital, and organizational effectiveness" (Cross, 2007, p. 32). The company not only had an overall improvement in communication, but also in productivity and resource management. The same was and is seen in Walmart. Walmart employees with the new technology had an easier time performing their job functions as well as communicating with each other on issues relating to inventory.

This is an aspect of IT through logistical operations that truly helps a store and in this instance, Walmart, communicate and supply effectively with reduced effort and lower costs. The traditional inventory check, which is done by hand, can be faulty and many times employees will either lie or be inaccurate with the count.

In fact, most of the time, employees have to count several times just to make sure the number they get is accurate, wasting valuable time and money as employees in retail are paid on an hourly basis. Using this technology not only saves time, but also improve accuracy as well as removes the need to use an archaic and unreliable method. Added advantage of satellite watching of trucks would be for locality, security, and delivery streamlining.

Much like the RFID tag, the purpose of these additions is to streamline the company's everyday processes to avoid unnecessary waste. In the instance of armored automobiles that transport money, security and location would be principal. This is being performed in many kinds of trucking businesses so that proprietors discern where their employees are and if there is a difficulty in communication. Through improvements such as these, they can locate them and quickly deal with any potential hiccups.

Restructuring and employing technology to keep track of procurements, transports, movement, and material benefits corporations in a plethora of ways. After all, if a merchant can collaborate with a business and be able to have enough money, permitting Purchase Order acceptance, RFID tags on merchandises when distributed, providing status of articles and catalogue, including bar coding on each merchandise, and shipment channeling - it protects the retail store from accidental occurrences and reduces consumption of two valuable resources, time and money.

An article about RFID tags shows how popular algorithms like DFSA assist in resolving any potential hiccups in RFID systems: Dynamic framed-slotted ALOHA (DFSA) is one of the most popular algorithms to resolve tag collision in RFID systems. In DFSA, it is widely known that the optimal performance is achieved when the frame size is equal to the number of tags. So, a reader dynamically adjusts the next frame size according to the current number of tags (Eom & Lee, 2010, p. 60).

Alleviating waste when doing things digitally is another benefit from these additions. For instance, the traditional way of taking inventory and submitting orders via traditional methods like fax and mail order use up a lot of paper and postage. Doing things electronically means a company gets an instant response and they can avoid spending money on things like paper, ink, and additional employees to handle paperwork. Walmart prior to these additions hired additional employees to manage office paperwork just because they were always inundated with orders.

For stores to possess the ability to track what sells, the price, on what day it sells, even the time of sale makes the work of employees and the overall workload of the company smaller. There is a remarkable benefit to possessing the ability to track such information and report it, input it, analyze it, and utilize it for future buying. One final addition Walmart has is wireless.