No industry has experienced the disruption of digital transformation more than retail. Amazon.com AMZN +1.42% has upended virtually every segment of this venerable industry, well beyond the bookstores that constituted the online retailer’s original target.

Go to any supermarket store and often the long lines of queue beg for a solution. This is the tradition that consumers have come to expect and tolerate for years. A 2015 Harris Poll study, commissioned by Digimarc Corporation, revealed that 88% of U.S. adults want their store checkout experience to be faster. The Nielsen global report “Retail Evolution: Why marketing to the middle doesn’t work anymore” noted that 43% of respondents identity the ability to get in and out quickly or fast checkout (41%) as highly influential in their decision to shop at a particular retailer.
And with the growing success of e-commerce and improving efficiencies in last mile delivery, brick and mortar retailers are working to shorten the checkout processing time in an effort to improve customer satisfaction.

The retail industry has changed dramatically in the digital age where everything is connected, requiring retailers to continue to innovate to better serve customers’ diverse needs, speakers have said at a one-day summit held in Ho Chi Minh City.

According to Techopedia, Big data refers to a process that is used when traditional data mining and handling techniques cannot uncover the insights and meaning of the underlying data. Data that is unstructured or time sensitive or simply very large cannot be processed by relational database engines.

Both Big Data and the IoT are the biggest names in the technology trend these days. There are definitely differences between the two, but there are also similarities that boost systems and operations.

“Thirty years ago, you would’ve been hard-pressed to find a vice president of supply chain at any retailer,” says Rick Schart, SVP of supply chain and ecommerce at Stein Mart. He started in the industry over 40 years ago in a very different environment — technology has been the biggest catalyst to evolution, and today computer systems for everything from warehouse management to transportation makes the job easier. Still, with the “incredible technology, and sophistication and complexity of it,” Schart says, it’s “more like rocket science.”

OpenGov speaks to Mr. Cyril Perducat, Executive Vice President Digital Services & IoT, Schneider Electric

In the first week of October, Prof. C. John Langley of Penn State University released his 22nd Annual Third-Party Logistics Study, which captures the state of the industry by surveying shipping and logistics professionals worldwide and conducting intensive workshops with industry leaders at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA. The study contains particularly useful findings for understanding the ever-growing role of data and analytics in the shipping and logistics industries and points to new opportunities that have so far been underexploited.

A subsidiary of the French electric utility company, EDF (mostly owned by the French state): Dalkia, leading company providing services in the Energy field, has chosen Geoconcept solution for optimizing schedules, Opti-time. Thanks to this tool, Dalkia aims to improve the field intervention of its technical team in France.