ZigBee Alliance and Leading GM & HBW Retail Trade Association Sign Liaison Agreement

DAVIS, CA – The ZigBee Alliance, a non-profit association of companies creating, maintaining and delivering open, global standards for the low-power wireless Internet of Things (IoT), has signed a liaison agreement with the Global Market Development Center (GMDC), a leading general merchandise (GM), health, beauty and wellness (HBW) retail trade association with more than 600 members worldwide. GMDC will recommend the Alliance’s ZigBee 3.0 standard and its retail services components to member companies, and share the organization’s vision for transforming the shopping infrastructure and experience.

The ZigBee 3.0 standard and its retail applications allow retailers to take a holistic, seamless approach to implementing personal shopping assistants and gateways, intelligent shopping carts, asset tracking systems and energy management solutions, merchandising and marketing systems, pharmacy services and many other functions on a single network. This approach reduces costs and increases efficiency as compared to solutions using proprietary systems and technologies.

ZigBee 3.0 retail applications offer new opportunities to gather information about customer shopping behavior that can be used to improve customer services. Retailers also can monitor items from the warehouse to in-store shelves, enhancing safety and ensuring quality through temperature and humidity monitoring during distribution. Shoppers benefit through an enhanced and more efficient and personalized shopping experience. The ZigBee 3.0 standard includes device definitions that are specific to retail service applications as well as definitions for more common sensor and actuator applications allowing retailers to build highly integrated custom solutions using readily available off-the-shelf standard components.

Development of the ZigBee 3.0 standard and its retail services components was led by retail and wireless communications leaders including The Kroger Co., Philips, Schneider Electric, Texas Instruments, AT&T, Exegin, Nietzsche, San Juan Software, STMicroelectronics, Telecom Italia, Ubilogix, V-Mark and Wincor-Nixdorf.

For more information, visit:
http://www.ZigBee.org
http://www.gmdc.org