Seeonic Announces Largest Deployment Of Its SmartWatch Technology Solution Featuring Item-Level Inventory Management Within Retail-Display Fixtures Owned And Operated By Tomorrow's Mother, A Maternity Apparel Company
MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Seeonic™ Inc., a leader in Actionable Intelligence, announced today the follow-on deployment of its SmartWatch™ technology solution within a Tomorrow's Mother RFID-enabled smart display across three retail department store chains. The SmartWatch business-intelligence-data service works with its complementary SightWare™ electronic module to track inventory in real time to reduce stock-outs and overstock conditions at the point of customer decision.
"With the Seeonic SmartWatch solution, we will see our retail inventory on display in real time," said Al Dittrich, CEO and president of Tomorrow's Mother, a maternity apparel company. "The opportunity to take decisive action based on actual inventory data certainly will have a positive impact on the efficiencies of our business."
The Seeonic SightWare™ electronic module automatically gathers inventory data from within a retail promotional display or permanent fixture. The second generation module utilizes the ThingMagic™ Mercury5e embedded RFID reader, which reads and communicates RFID tag data through a real-time wireless interface to the data-intelligence service SmartWatch™ for analysis and reporting. Once the data is collected, the SmartWatch business intelligence system provides a secure web-accessible suite of software tools allowing customers to track product inventory and perform predictive inventory analysis with the goal of reducing product stock outs at the retail store level.
"Utilizing the ThingMagic™ Mercury5e provides the superior read sensitivity we need to acquire the maximum tag reads from the fixture. The Mercury5e reader embedded within our electronics is the highest performing mobile platform in the industry to deliver on item level tagging," said Harley Feldman, President and CTO at Seeonic.
"Seeonic's SmartWatch solution is an ideal application for ThingMagic's Mercury5e embedded reader module, which provides optimal tag reading sensitivity and accuracy with a small form factor, and low power requirements," said Tom Grant, CEO at ThingMagic. "This is another example of an exciting RFID supply chain application that demonstrably helps a consumer goods company efficiently and accurately manage stocking levels in a retail environment."
Seeonic's solution benefits manufacturers like Tomorrow's Mother, by providing real-time visibility into consumer demand for all clothing inventory on the display. By having access to this information, the manufacturer can make smart replenishment decisions, ensuring out-of-stock conditions are avoided. The SightWare and SmartWatch platform provides retailers, apparel and CPG manufacturers with a substantially improved view of their marketing effectiveness and replenishment execution.
ThingMagic's Mercury5e UHF reader module is an embedded version of the RFID core in ThingMagic's best-in-class Mercury5 fixed RFID reader. About the same size as a PCMCIA Type II PC card, it concentrates Mercury5's performance into a tiny package, enabling ThingMagic partners to design ThingMagic RFID into their own devices. The module is ideal for adding UHF RFID read/write capabilities to a wide range of mobile and handheld devices, and other small form factor systems requiring high performance RFID.
The Seeonic SmartWatch and SightWare solution is both economical and flexible while requiring minimal capital investment and no in-store IT infrastructure support. SmartWatch is a fully integrated suite of business analytics, demand management, and inventory-status alerting tools offered on a monthly subscription basis; while SightWare is a low-cost, flexible and recyclable RFID-enabled sensing module. The Seeonic platform offers manufacturers and retailers the ability to increase revenues by reducing stock-outs and overstocks at the store level.
Seeonic is located in Minneapolis, MN and ThingMagic is located in Cambridge, MA. For more information, please visit Seeonic at www.seeonic.com and ThingMagic at www.thingmagic.com.
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