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NTU Management Review Vol. 34 No. 3 Dec. 2024

relationships and interactions among actors in the network during digital transformation.
This paper is divided into five main sections. Section 1 provides background
information. Section 2 provides a clear understanding of digital transformation by
elaborating on the different levels of ecosystem digital transformation mentioned and

discussed in prior studies. Section 3 offers the methodology, explaining our exploratory
case study of ESL retail transformation using secondary data from internet sources,
followed by our coding scheme. Lastly, we elaborate on our findings, discuss the result

based on theoretical key literature, and provide the contribution of theoretical and
management practices.

2. Literature Review

2.1 ESL and Its Advantages
As illustrated in Figure 1, an ESL device is a device retailers use to display product
price information on shelves. More exactly, an e-paper shown on the screen of a digital

shelf label system uses a local network to display or update product pricing. Even better,
companies can update the system remotely and alter product prices concurrently across
all stores. The low power consumption lowers the operational and maintenance costs of
ESL. We then explain why ESL is an important focal point for digital transformation and
why this technology deserves any attention in the case of retail digital transformation as

follows.
First, ESL can open opportunities previously barred, for example, by operation
efficiency. For instance, although AI has been applied in retail to forecast prices, the
calculation does not suddenly affect prices shown on the shelves in real time. In the past,

changing prices required in-store employees to manually change pricing by removing old
price tags and placing new ones on the shelves. Such store operations require much in-
store staff, increasing operational costs. However, by implementing ESL, retailers can
update prices faster and more efficiently. ESL can leverage the use of AI to forecast prices

and enable real-time dynamic pricing.
Second, ESL can uniquely enhance customer wellbeing by improving the customer
experience (Ovani and Windasari, 2022) through enhancements in a display called
Enhanced Display for Grocery Environment (EDGE) (Walton, 2019). ESL can integrate

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