Fujitsu today delivers on its new Connected Retail strategy in enabling major international retailers and their customers to go mobile with a range of omni-channel services for the modern retail environment. By extending its revolutionary FUJITSU Market Place omni-channel Point of Service (PoS) application to mobile, Fujitsu offers PoS and clienteling solutions to measure customer engagement as part of a complete suite of end-to-end services intended to enable retailers to significantly increase revenue while reducing IT costs. Fujitsu also introduces a new retail-ready dockable tablet device.

The rise of mobile commerce is changing how people shop, forcing retailers to rethink customer engagement and orchestrate the combination of in-store and online processes. Mobile is influencing purchasing decisions before shoppers set foot in the store, encouraging price comparison at the point of selection and accounting for an ever-growing percentage share of online transactions. As a consequence, mobile is becoming the ‘hub’ of information, communication and order management for shoppers and store associates alike.

To reflect this change in shopping habits, retailers are experimenting to determine which enterprise and consumer mobile solutions work best. Innovation, platform flexibility and speed of deployment remain as key consideration, as does the need to support enterprise-wide transaction and order fulfilment in an agile and future-proof way.

The new FUJITSU Market Place Mobile is designed to reflect emerging business needs of the modern omni-channel retailer, putting front and back-office integrated services – such as PoS, order management, clienteling, and store performance – into the hands of associates and store management, to deliver a consistent and seamless customer experience.

David Concordel, Vice President, Retail Solutions, Fujitsu, says: “With mobile-enabled sales continuing to grow, it has never been more important for retailers to deliver a high value, robust and efficient mobile capabilities. We believe retailers can best achieve this by closely integrating functionality, device and service – regardless of platform, off- as well as online, and without investment risk. FUJITSU Retail Solution Market Place Mobile is designed to deliver a complete solution comprised of omni-channel retailing applications and workflow, retail-ready mobile devices and managed mobile services. These are intended to help our customers improve the customer experience and reduce costs.”

According to Miya Knights, Senior Research Analyst, IDC Retail Insights: “Omni-channel is leading retailers to look at how all their business functions/groups interoperate to support a consistent view of a customer, a customer’s behavior, and how to balance a supply chain to merchandise and fulfill against that. To this end, retailers are looking to vendor solutions that support one or many aspects of an omni-channel IT strategy but that also meet the requirement to integrate seamlessly with multiple technologies from other vendors to deliver aggregated omni-channel business services. IDC believes FUJITSU Market Place is a strong platform to support the integration challenges that retailers, with both online and physical stores, are faced with.”

Dropped transactions, when mobile devices lose connectivity to the in-store network, is currently one of retailing’s biggest mobile challenges. FUJITSU Market Place Mobile is specifically designed to counter this and enable continuous selling when running on a range of portable Windows devices. Fujitsu offers a truly native application that allows transactions to continue uninterrupted, even when access is lost to the in-store network mid-transaction. Local databases for items, pricing and promotions are supported on the Windows tablets allowing transactions to complete seamlessly in offline mode, even including tender and payment. The solution also supports generic loyalty promotions in offline mode, with all transaction data automatically synchronized when network access is restored.

Retailers can minimize investment risk and reduce total cost of ownership thanks to FUJITSU Market Place Mobile’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based modular design. This enables retailers to deliver value-added changes, such as supporting new mobile devices, sourcing new datasets (for example, adding a Social Clienteling app to open up access to customer records from an app’s database) and providing new in-store workflows, re-using standard retail functionality and without re-coding existing PoS business logic.

New retail-hardened tablet device meets a range of in-store uses

Fujitsu introduces a new retail-hardened, shop-floor-ready tablet device with long runtime. The device incorporates an interchangeable ‘smart shell’ that supports a range of third-party peripherals including Europay, Mastercard and Visa-compliant card payments. A cradle is also available to support and power standard retail peripherals.

To meet the exacting needs of retailers, the Fujitsu tablet is designed to support retail processes and enable mobile-relevant applications and services for ‘Click & Collect’, clienteling, loyalty, in-store support and store-associate tasking. The device also helps improve customer experience by supporting continuous selling, avoiding dropped transactions even if network connectivity is lost.

New managed service wrapper for smooth management and integration

Fujitsu’s new managed service wrapper for mobile means managing and integrating devices is easier than ever, providing a single point of contact for all solution elements and ensuring one common service level is maintained and monitored through Fujitsu’s global service desks.

FUJITSU Market Place awarded a ‘Top Retail Product 2015’ Special Jury Prize

The importance to retail innovation of FUJITSU Market Place was recognized in the annual ‘Top Produkt Handel 2015’ competition in Germany, which awarded a special Jury Prize in the newly introduced catagory ‘Early Watchlist’ by organizers, retail trade publisher LPV Media GmbH. Fujitsu will receive this award during the EuroCIS show on Tuesday, February 24, at 16:30 in the Multichannel Forum in Hall 9, Messe Düsseldorf. This year, 21 candidates were nominated in seven categories. A jury evaluated submissions according to the criteria of user value, customer satisfaction, relevance, solution expertise and innovation.

Pricing and availability

FUJITSU Market Place is available globally to retail customers, while the FUJITSU Market Place Mobile application, mobile enterprise device as well as managed mobile service and support will be available globally from April 2015. FUJITSU Market Place Mobile will initially be available for two mobile platforms, Windows and iOS, with Android to follow.