The cameras of the automatic cleaning systems record the inventory in the supermarkets.
(Photo: PR)
new York Sam’s Club is a subsidiary of the world’s largest retailer Walmart – with a huge inventory. Sam’s Club is a membership-based type of wholesale business, which is also open to private customers.
The branches are similar to those of the Metro in Germany and are very popular with US families because they can get everything in bulk there. The stores mostly look like spacious warehouses with high shelves and wide aisles. And they have to be filled and organized.
1. The problem: Inventory is very time-consuming in supermarkets
As with all supermarkets, one of the biggest challenges is managing inventory – how many products are bought, sold, in store, in stock or to order. This is already highly automated today. But often this still requires people to walk down the hallways to check where there are gaps in the shelves.
The same applies when it comes to making sure that the prices on the signs on the shelves are really up to date, when a special offer is running, or when eggs suddenly become more expensive because of chicken flu or strawberries become cheaper in summer.
2. The solution: Cleaning robots collect data as they drive through the aisles
At the Walmart subsidiary Sam’s Club driverless cleaning machines drive through the aisles, on which a small tower with cameras is attached. While the machine is cleaning, the cameras take 20 million photos a day and, thanks to artificial intelligence, not only check prices, but also how many of the respective products are still on the shelves and what has to be taken from the warehouse or reordered.
“It gives us critical inventory data that was previously very time consuming to obtain,” said Todd Garner, Sam’s Club vice president of product management. These cleaning robots at Sam’s Club are the result of a cooperation between the software company Brain Corp and the cleaning machine specialists Tennant Company. You can further automate the work, at least partially.
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Each of the 600 Sam’s Club stores today has such a cleaning robot with a so-called “Inventory Intelligence” tower. “The device can tell Kellogg’s Fruit Loops from Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and understand how many packs are left on the shelf,” Anshu Bhardwaj, vice president of tech strategy and commercialization at Walmart, recently told CNBC.
It also recognizes the shadow of packaging that is further behind. The machine teaches itself how to calculate how deep the shelves are and how much light indicates how many packs, explains the manager.
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Should a product become scarce and no longer available in stock, the algorithm automatically instructs the employees to take the next delivery from the truck directly to the store and not to the warehouse. According to Bhardwaj, the company has increased the productivity of Sam’s Club employees by 15 percent in this way.
Walmart, with its 4,700 supermarkets and 600 Sam’s Club stores, already has a large amount of data, largely thanks to its membership programs. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the group wants to evaluate and use this even better. “Customers generate all this little data about what they like and want. This allows us to improve the shopping experience,” said Walmart manager Bhardwaj. This also means that all 6,000 products that Sam’s Club currently carries are always available in the store, she explains.
3. The outlook: Smart cleaning robots could also come to Europe
The smart cleaning robot model is also suitable for other supermarkets or wholesale markets with sufficiently wide aisles. Brain Corp has already presented the technology at a trade fair in Europe. According to its own statements, the cooperation with Sam’s Club has already made the technology company Brain Corp the largest supplier of robots for inventory scanning.
According to Mark Rousset, retail expert at strategy consultancy Oliver Wyman, these visual analysis tools are extremely interesting for supermarkets. They could also check whether the goods are actually presented as agreed in the contracts with the suppliers. This can save retailers penalties. This can be done with the cleaning robots, but also with cameras on the ceiling or an app.
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