CLEVELAND - Agilysys Inc., provider of enterprise computer technology solutions, announced in a news release its integral involvement in creating a world-class, interactive grocery shopping experience for the Camp Hill Giant Super Food Stores, a subsidiary of Ahold USA Inc. The announcement coincides with the Giant Food Stores' grand opening Oct. 12 of its new concept store located in Camp Hill, PA. This solution is one of the largest, leading-edge implementations and integrations of self-service shopping technology in the U.S. retail industry.

"Today's competitive grocery retail environment has driven retailers to utilize technology as a key customer service advantage for their shoppers," said Bob Bailey, executive vice president, Agilysys. "Giant understands that their customers lead busy lives and they want to make it easier and more convenient to shop in their stores."

Giant's new 91,200 sq. ft. Camp Hill store features an innovative approach to store design, layout and merchandising while using state of the art technologies to help customers find products, place orders, get information and check out with greater ease and speed.

"The customer-friendly technology at the Camp Hill Giant store will go beyond the last wave of grocery retail innovations such as self-checkout and standalone kiosks," said Tony Schiano, president and chief executive officer, Giant Food Stores. "Since Agilysys has been our long-time store technology integration partner, we knew they could deliver on a world-class interactive shopping experience with the newest technology advancements. They understood we wanted a store that provided a greater focus on efficiency for every customer's shopping trip."

To deliver this retail solution, Agilysys teamed with St. Clair Interactive Communications Inc., IBM Corp., and Symbol Technologies Inc. to implement a multi-application kiosk system and a portable personal shopper system.

Giant's Shopping Solutions includes 23 self-service kiosk applications running on 25 IBM Anyplace Kiosks with Symbol MS 3207 MiniScan scanners and five large LCD digital media screens interfacing to 14 legacy data sources, content and operations integration. These kiosks allow shoppers to complete many in-store tasks with the touch of the screen, including pre-ordering from specialty shops within the store (bakery, deli, prescriptions, etc.). Shoppers can also receive personalized offers and coupons based on their shopping history, reference information from their loyalty card and look up prices on various products throughout the store all via special applications developed by Agilysys.

To allow shoppers to quickly locate items in the store, the system utilizes the iPAL product locator software from Treo Systems. The applications from ShoptoCook Inc. allow customers to access a wide variety of recipes, while applications from Healthnotes Inc. provide content-rich, health, wellness and pharmacy related information. All of these applications are integrated with a common user interface using St. Clair Interactive's application templates.

St. Clair's infrastructure software provides Giant's management the ability to centrally control, manage and distribute store promotions based on the time of day to the kiosks and digital media LCD screens located throughout the store. The company also played a major role as an application provider by supplying products to help Giant's legacy technology systems with store ordering, customer loyalty, targeted offers and information on products, store amenities and community events.

Using the multi-application kiosk system, shoppers have the ability to receive takeaway printouts via a printer from Practical Automation Inc. which is housed in a sleek, custom-designed enclosure supplied by Frank Mayer & Associates.

The Camp Hill store has 72 portable Symbol PS3050 handheld mobile computing devices for customers' use that are tightly integrated into Giant's POS and self-checkout systems. Shoppers can use their EasyShop scanner to move through the store, scanning and bagging their purchases as they go. The device records the purchases and keeps a running total of the dollars spent during the shopping trip. EasyWeigh allows shoppers to easily self-weigh their produce items and print a label. EasyScan also makes the checkout process fast and easy with a simple scan of an "end of trip" bar code, eliminating the need to unload, scan, bag and reload items from a shopper's cart.