BGN, the Netherlands' largest bookstore, has implemented a range of software applications.

The chain has more than 40 stores, 730 employees, and over 11m visitors a year. Its Selexyz stores carry between 20 000 and 275 000 books, selling between 15 000 and 40 000 books a day.

BGN faces the same challenges as other retailers, such as closing stores for stocktake; and having the right books available, at the right time, in the right stores; but, in addition, it must compete with virtual book traders, such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, which operate globally. As such, it says that it has to dramatically improve internal operations and provide a superior in-store customer experience.

BGN's approach to these challenges was to create the SmartStore, which it takes to market through the auspices of the Selexyz brand. The solutions stack as developed and delivered for BGN and leverage a range of new-generation technologies.

BGN has also embarked on an automation programme that integrates its business applications with a service-oriented architecture (SOA); and implemented item-level radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging to optimise its supply chain and enhance the customer experience.

BGN is launching two fully automated SmartStores, which combine item-level RFID tagging and SOA to deliver a tightly integrated supply chain, from warehouse to consumer. The first SmartStore has been launched in Almere. Immediate benefits are said to be:

* The business has reduced the number of manual inventory steps, reduced opportunity for error, and enhanced management of its supply chain process.
* From an operational point of view, the SOA distributed solution requires no in-store administrative staff, a critical consideration for the future scaling of the system.
* From an IT perspective, the architecture chosen allowed implementation in just over half the time relative to comparable deployments in the market.