ThinkIN goes to Australia: the value of a global ecosystem

As the demand for indoor location increases, RTLS projects are requested and implemented worldwide. As the need becomes global, it entails a larger complexity to deal with and a broader reach of companies delivering location-based solutions and services.

ThinkIN has always had a global reach (before the pandemic, the export share was more than 50% percent of the company revenues) and has tackled with its solutions so many challenges and needs in different areas of the world. 

Further place we’ve reached? Australia! 

In this blog post, we would like to tell you the story of an important partnership with an Australian distributor and of a powerful ecosystem able to connect three companies, located in three different countries, to jointly and successfully deliver a location intelligence project in the retail industry in Australia.

An Australian supermarket chain wanted to increase the visibility over in-store customer behaviour and in-store operations processes. To enable this, the Customer was searching for an indoor location solution able to track shopping trolleys and baskets with sub-meter accuracy and to support the team in actioning and enhancing decision making. 

The Customer had already tried different vendors in the market but was not satisfied in terms of accuracy or reliability reached by other hardware and software providers. The real challenge was to understand customer behaviour not only at the macro-zone level (e.g. department) but also down to aisles and product categories. Needless to say that to do so, great accuracy is key.

The Customer reached out to Gradient Advanced Technologies, a distributor, application developer and systems integrator of RTLS products. 

Gradient has been a partner of ThinkIN since 2019 and, since then, we’ve had ongoing conversations to develop new projects in different industries (e.g. retail, manufacturing) as well as receive direct insights from the Australian market and its indoor location adoption. 

Gradient, in the same way as ThinkIN, is a partner of the ecosystem of Quuppa, the Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) provider based on Bluetooth Low Energy and Angle-of-Arrival technologies.

A joint solution was delivered to the Customer, with Gradient Advanced Technologies being the only one partner managing the conversations and the requests from the Customer. 

In background, Quuppa would take care of the provisioning of the Real-Time Locating System (RTLS) hardware infrastructure, able to reach sub-meter accuracy down to the aisle and product category level, while ThinkIN would take care of the delivery of its in-store analytics solution, RetailerIN, able to crunch all the location data and transform them into actionable analytics and KPIs on customer behaviour.

A key challenge for the project was the need to coordinate the efforts of the three different knowledgeable parties, all located in different regions of the globe: Australia (Gradient), Finland (Quuppa) and Italy (ThinkIN).

The solution was successfully installed by Gradient in one store, covering an area of around 3000 sqm, with 32 locators mounted and around 600 carts and 240 baskets tracked. Gradient designed the implementation layout and infrastructure, supervised the hardware installation and took care of fine tuning the Quuppa infrastructure to ensure that accuracy and coverage goals were met, while ThinkIN was responsible for the store configuration on the RetailerIN platform together with data collection, crunching and analytics.

The project was managed entirely and successfully remotely despite the distance and time zones involved. This was possible thanks to the presence of an experienced and technically competent Quuppa Ecosystem Partner in Australia, Gradient Advanced Technologies, who was able to work directly with the Customer’s team, manage the design, installation and refinement of infrastructure elements of the project and work closely with ThinkIN on the RetailerIN implementation. In this way, the Customer did not have to bear the complexity of different providers located internationally on itself but could benefit from a unique integrated solution able to respond to all its needs.

This project highlights the ability that the ecosystem has to enable complex implementations using RTLS technologies and applications from across the globe to meet each single customer’s individual needs. Thanks to this, it is possible to satisfy the global demand for indoor location services and reach new customers and markets.