Wal-mart Stores, Inc.

Walmart Apollo, LLC

Jie Ouyang

Mahesh Sundar Thangaraj

Kevin E Hill

Josh Osmon

Michael Shawn McGuire

Doyle Reece

Aaron Santavicca

Kishore Kumar Konate

Zulfiqar Ali Paracha

Vidanage Prabuddha Mangala Chandrasiri

Nicholaus Adam Jones

Vidanage Prabuddha Chandrasiri

Michael Shawn Mcguire

A system is disclosed for providing retailer controllable access to consolidated inventory management services through a retail worker's personal smartphone. The system&#x2014;operable largely within and through the retailer's private computing network&#x2014;comprises data nodes, an enterprise service bus, and a device application. Inventory-related data is kept in the data nodes, with access thereto from suitably provisioned personal mobile devices moderated by the enterprise service bus pursuant to policies and parameters defined by the retailer. Provisioning the personal mobile device involves installation thereon of the device application. The device application launches a user interface for accessing the data nodes through the enterprise service bus, thus enabling the use on the worker's personal mobile device of retailer-specific, job-related inventory management tools.

Retail inventory management services through personal mobile devices

These teachings are suitable for use in conjunction with a process having access to both coverage information that maps the coverage area for each of a plurality of RFID-tag readers to physical locations within a given monitored facility and historical-read information for a population of RFID tags, and that uses that historical-read information and that coverage information to automatically determine the physical location of RFID tags. In particular, these teachings generally provide for accessing supplemental information regarding physical locations for at least some of those RFID tags and then comparing the automatically-determined physical location information with the supplemental information to thereby identify physical-location discrepancies. By one approach those physical-location discrepancies are used to adjust the automated process by which the automatically-determined physical location information is automatically determined to thereby improve accuracy of the automated process.

Method and apparatus pertaining to the identification of physical-local discrepancies in statistics-based RFID-tag information

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Auburn Hills, MI, United States of America

Jie Ouyang