Electronic shelf labels

Every price on a shelf edge is the end of a data path. Electronic shelf labels make that path visible: change a price centrally and the label has to change, in every store, without anyone walking the aisle with a printer.

What the work was

Accumulating the data held across internal systems and getting it, in the right shape, to the external system that drives the labels themselves.

The interesting part is not the transport, it is the accumulation. The information that ends up on one small display is assembled from several sources that were never designed to be read together, each with its own idea of what a product is and when it changed. Getting that to one consistent view, continuously and for a whole estate of stores, is the actual problem.

It also has an unusually short tolerance for being wrong. A stale integration in a back-office report is an inconvenience; a stale price on a shelf edge is visible to every customer in the shop, and it is the shop that has to answer for it.