Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: August 30, 2024
The News: Scandit held its Empower 2024 conference in New York in late August. The event featured executive presentations on new products and the future roadmap, customer case studies and stories, and deep dives and demos into the company’s smart data capture technology. It also featured an awards presentation highlighting the company’s North American Smart Data Capture Awards winners and runners-up.
Scandit Empower Features Innovation in Retail and Beyond
Analyst Take: Smart data capture technology is at the forefront of connecting the physical and digital worlds. Instead of manually scanning individual items, smart data capture technology is designed to leverage automation, artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and computer vision technology to streamline workflows, improve efficiency and productivity, and reduce friction with scanning tasks.
Scandit’s Empower 2024 event highlighted the company, its partners, and customers’ work to realize the benefits derived from its innovative solutions. The company’s two-day event featured keynote presentations from the company’s executive leadership, including CEO Samuel Muller and CTO Christian Flörkemeier, and presentations from other senior product marketing leaders.
The event included an overview of the company’s latest product, SDK 7.0, and several case studies from leading retail customers. In these sessions, the customers detailed challenges within their workflows and discussed the Scandit products and initiatives used to improve efficiency, convenience, and productivity for their employees and customers.
Scandit Smart Data Capture Awards Highlighted Innovation and Real-World ROI
As part of Scandit Empower, the finalists and winners of the Scandit Smart Data Capture Awards for the Americas were announced. The awards covered the following categories: Partner of the Year, SMB Innovation of the Year, Operational Excellence of the Year, Customer Experience of the Year, Innovation of the Year, and Everyday Superhero of the Year.
The awards were reviewed by a panel of four judges, who included two representatives from Scandit (Chris Annese, VP of Global Sales; and Felix Stieger, VP of Enterprise Success), and two outside independent analysts from The Futurum Group (Steven Dickens, Chief Technology Advisor, and me).
While we cannot release the winners’ names, I found several commonalities across nearly all entrants. First, most challenges revolved around eliminating time-consuming and inefficient manual processes, such as hand-scanning items, or manually inputting information.
Leveraging smart data capture solutions speeds up these processes. It can improve accuracy by eliminating both inadvertent human errors and deliberate data falsification (e.g., a worker, pressed for time, makes up information instead of capturing or verifying data).
Using an automated system also introduces more consistency of results, particularly in retail scenarios, which are often negatively impacted by high worker turnover rates. Eliminating the need to train and enforce proper manual scanning and counting methodologies aids in consistent and verifiable data capture over time.
Another commonality among the finalists and winners was the presence of real-world, impactful results from deploying smart data capture technology. Nearly all of the winners – from large retailers to government organizations to logistics providers – could point to greater efficiency and productivity, and, most importantly, a reduction in the amount of friction experienced by employees and workers to conduct basic and more complex tasks.
Most importantly, nearly all of the winners appeared to be considering their smart data capture award entry not as a final destination but as a step along a larger digital transformation initiative to leverage new technology to improve physical data capture and management processes. It is likely that these organizations, along with many others, will continue to seek out and implement new technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and other human-machine interfaces in the future.
Leveraging AI to Deliver Value by Linking Physical and Digital Realms
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the award finalists and winners was their pragmatic approach to deploying smart data capture technology. In each case, a real-world bottleneck, process breakdown, or barrier was identified, and smart data capture technology was applied to address the friction, enabling workers to do their jobs more efficiently or with less effort or letting them focus on other tasks entirely.
In speaking with CTO Christian Flörkemeier, he mentioned that this approach to addressing a specific problem and then applying technology to resolve it is the way the company approaches using AI. The company is focused on leveraging technology to enhance existing processes and technologies to improve specific worker scenarios and use cases. He expects that the AI’s ability to capture and help synthesize data from multiple sources quickly and efficiently will be a catalyst for reducing the natural friction points when trying to move data between physical and digital realms.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Scandit Expands Shelf Intelligence with MarketLab’s Fixed-Camera Tech
Scandit Express 3.0: The Future of Barcode Scanning and Smart Data Capture
The Rising Importance of Authentication in a Digitally Insecure World
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
