Conexxus In the News

C-Store Decisions: New Technology Brings New Challenges

Monday November 12, 2018

Today, most all convenience store retailers have a back-office interfaced to their point of sale (POS). With back-office software, retailers have the capability of capturing sales data by transaction, by item, deposits and credit card information, etc. This enables home-office enterprise systems to receive this information electronically and reconcile various accounts quickly and accurately. This process reduces the potential of theft or just general incorrect data flow....

Tuesday October 16, 2018

Splitting hairs between what business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) mean could be a frivolous game of semantics, but for retailers hoping to unlock the transactional secrets stored in their point-of-sale (POS) registers, understanding the differences could prove crucial, according to a Tech Edge (co-sponsored with Conexxus) session speaker at the 2018 NACS Show in Las Vegas.

Wednesday September 12, 2018

"We are extremely pleased to have a person of Jenny’s background and expertise joining the Conexxus staff," said Conexxus Director of Standards Linda Toth. "She will help spread the message about Conexxus and the work we are doing to advance standards, advocate on behalf of the industry and bring clarity on upcoming technologies.".....

Friday September 7, 2018

Bullard, a highly-regarded technology professional in the convenience store industry, comes to Conexxus with a long history of advocating for standards and using technology to benefit the industry and the organizations she has worked for.....

Monday June 25, 2018

As an IT leader wins from store managers were an important measure of success and when vendors joined in sending their invoices electronically, using the Conexxus NAXML standard, the momentum those wins caused was phenomenal. The implementation of the standard has been made easy thanks to the efforts of the Conexxus EB2B committee and back-office system providers. The committee provides support to retailers interested in learning more and have advocated for the adoption of the standard by merchandise vendors....

Thursday May 10, 2018

During his "Artificial Intelligence Applications in Merchandising" education session at the event, Thompson defined AI as a branch of computer science that deals with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers, and the capability of a machine to imitate. Among the AI-powered solutions that Thompson said retailers are beginning to take advantage of are: goal-seeking agents that seek to identify and implement decisions to produce beneficial outputs; and systems that leverage external data and machine-learning techniques to provide recommendations and/or automated decisions.....

Tuesday May 8, 2018

Blockchain is often defined in different ways depending on who is talking. Is it an idea? An implementation? A distributed transaction ledger? Jennifer O’Rourke, co-founder and president of Attest, a blockchain-based digital identity company, sees it as a problem-solving technology of the fourth Industrial Revolution that’s likely to have a major impact on the retail industry.....

Monday May 7, 2018

The theme at this year’s Conexxus Annual Conference was clear: Disrupt your business or be disrupted. Not only are competitors such as dollar stores and online retailers increasingly encroaching on the convenience-store retailing business but a new definition of convenience is rising among consumers, and that will affect their expectations of c-stores. “I don’t think Amazon is coming after my business, but I think they’re training consumers to shop differently,” said Kevin Smartt, CEO of Kwik Chek, Austin, Texas. From a rock ‘n' roll star turned missile defense expert for the U.S. military to a representative from the Illinois state government explaining the potential of blockchain for c-stores and American society, the speakers at the technology-standards conference, held April 30 through May 3, embodied this push to think differently about the industry.

Here are nine highlights from the 2018 Conexxus conference.....

Sunday May 6, 2018

Vish Ganapathy of Accenture shares insights on why convenience retailers must use technology to change their business models. “Technology is easy,” said Ganapathy. “It’s the people and the process that are hard. It’s not mobile and drones or IoT that are disrupting. It’s people who bring disintermediation to your value chain that is going to be disruptive.” Noting that retailers today spend a lot of time focusing on the customer experience, Ganapathy said that if they are not also focusing on the business model and the value chain, then the overall customer experience will be like putting lipstick on a pig. “It’s not going to be sustainable. You have to think about how your value chain is being disrupted.....

Wednesday May 2, 2018

Jeffrey "Skunk" Baxter is best known for jamming on the guitar for the Doobie Brothers but, in more recent years, he’s become a well-regarded national security expert, using insights gleaned from his music career to provide outside-the-box thinking. It’s that sort of thinking that Baxter encouraged convenience store retailers to embrace during his keynote address at the 2018 Conexxus Annual Conference. Baxter advised the convenience store retailers in attendance to "show there's another answer to the solution" and "find people who are like-minded" when they want to generate ideas from people who might be prone to confirmation biases.....