California Apparel News

Technology seems to change at lightning-quick speed, and Paul Gay has spent the last 15 years making sure retai lers are not left behind. Gay is the president of Seattle-area information-technology business Memory Technology Corp. He also is one of the leaders of an effort to modernize retail technology on behalf of National Retail Federation trade group. For the past two years, he has served as the chairman of the Unified Point of Service (POS) Committee for the NRF’s Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). Its mission is to create rules or standards for retailers’ various point-of-sales devices.

Different engineers associated with the group wrote code in computer languages, such as XML, that enabled the simple retail machines to work together and share information for the first time. It ensured retailers would keep access to a growing universe of information technology and keep pace with a market that is increasingly automated, as well as a consumer who is technologically savvy.

In January, Gay’s committee will introduce the “Unified POS 2.0” system, which will be the latest standard by ARTS.

Gay recently spoke with California Apparel News Retail Editor Andrew Asch about the new worlds of retail technology.

What is Unified POS?

It started 15 years ago. The issue for major [computer hardware] manufacturers was that everything was proprietary. All equipment [that retailers used] was proprietary. [The] initiative took basic retailers’ devices and interfaced them with the PC. It was a reason why Microsoft grew quickly in the retail realm.

Things have changed greatly since then. With the advent of the Internet and the inclusion of additional POS devices such as mobile phones, iPads, cloud [computing] services, you got to have standardized ways to communicate. The only way do that was to standardize Internet interface and to expand functionality in retail spaces.

Is the system continuing to change?

In 1995, POS was just a pointof- sale system. The only information it would give out was how many items sold in a batch. From 2000 to 2005, it became a point-of-service system. You could check people out, monitor inventory. By 2010, it is a pointof- information system. It’s got more functionality with customerrelationship management. It can do Google searches and look for a whole realm of information.

It has expanded into infrastructure in the mobile-phone area. Retailers are wrestling with what this means. Retailers are not going to like the fact that you went to [a store], you saw a pair of shoes and with a bar code [from the shoes] and a search on your phone, they can find the same shoes at a lower price next door. They may not think it is cool. This information is becoming ubiquitous to the consumer, and retailers must think of how they will protect themselves.

How else is information protected and not protected?

Those questions are evolving now. There is private information and information that is absolutely protected, such as your address, driver’s license and credit card number. The private information that retailers collect, and you, as a customer, give out, might be in a database. It is information that you are willing to give out, such as “I like purple” and “I am a size 8.”

In the old days, Saks and Nordstrom salespeople would write this information down in [paper] notebooks. If the salesperson changed jobs, the retailer would lose all of that information. Now all of that information is in CRM databases. A salesperson will have access into the store’s CRM database.