Final shoutout for a successful shelf audit robotics year
Analytics Inside wrote a very interesting recap note on which robotics applications have been developing the Retail industry in 2021. I just realized I've been scouting these technologies for a long time in the Bay Area before to have my current occupations. And it's been an interesting evolution for robotics for somehow soon 10 years.
It's been many years that robots took the lead on supply chain investments, remembering Amazon acquiring Kiva Systems back in 2012 that gave a strong signal to the industry that e-commerce needed to be developed and automated. Pichtbook mentions on the article that "the acquisition was revolutionary." It was not just a signal sent to the NASDAQ index, but certainly the announcement of the rise of robots. Now with Ocado, Geek+, Exotec, Takeoff Technologies, Fabric, you can find a solution for every situation, for every supply chain demand, for every square feet, for every country, every continent. The old logistics specialists are coming with something new. How to make a ROI? That's another story, let's see in a few years which are winners...because the success of a technology always come from the success of the customers, not because of the articles you can find on specialized press.
Side notes:
Retail Assistants never demonstrated making an impact on customer service. I remember visiting Orchard Supply's store in San Jose where I was supposed to find an OSHbot robot running down the store helping customer to find products. Associates were telling me with a big smile that the guy was having a long nap. I haven't heard a lot from LoweBot as well since 2017, except in a few Forbes articles (which does not necessarily means much), but I'm definitely unsure it scaled much within the 2,000 stores something the Retailer has in the US. Lowe's Innovation Lab did its job (following few hundred thousands of dollars spent with Singularity University maybe?), but it's obvious that one robot in a store can be efficient in front of a crowd of customers getting into a store searching for something. A mobile app could be much more efficient, right?!
Cleaning robots are most probably helpful within a store, but an expensive amount of investment without real ROI unless you want to jump on the "how-many-people-a-cleaning-robot-is-replacing" chat, which always sounds to me a bit weird. I guess this is now a mandatory tool to use with its cost written in the P&L forever and there's nothing more to inspect here. And agree to have these big machines going around the store during operating hours. I'd make a similar comment on security robots, which have found their own slow commercial path, fighting skeptical Retailers light knights were going for a crusade, always on a quest for new investors. See?!
Drones? Don't tell me about it.
"Please expand".
Unless you want to scare birds trapped in the store by night, or even bats, there is some homework to do here. RFID inventory tracking could be an option. Speaking about home delivery using drones, well there are some big US guys in Retail (always the same) active on this playground because you must be able to allocate a bunch of resources to have this type of shipment being a success. Good luck with the scale. To setup an opera of hundred of drones in the sky by New Years Eve is doable, but thousands and thousands for online orders, OMG.
And now...
领英推荐
Now about autonomous shelf monitoring technology
Disclosure: I'm in charge of the International activities of a company I'm going to mention below.
"Autonomous shelf monitoring technology leverages robots to move around retail stores and capture images of shelves and aisles at different times. Then these robots digitize the images and provide in-depth accurate insights of potential out-of-stock shelves and a list of products needed to "reshelve" again for customers to purchase from the particular store. It can detect sudden and unexpected shifts in inventory without any human intervention."
It's been definitely a great year 2021 putting Simbe Robotics part of the "robotics applications that have made retail operations much more efficient".
Following Schnuck Markets to become world’s first grocer to deploy intelligence robots chainwide (from 15 robots in 20017 to 111 this year) and MAF Carrefour expanding pioneering robotic deployment in Middle East, there is no equivalent companies deploying a fleet of robots demonstrating such positive returns in several business cases, in the US (Bossa Nova is still around but without robots apparently) but most of all in Europe where some never-ending prototyping, or another nascent collaboration with a big sporting goods retailers did not yet demonstrate its efficiency at scale.
Simbe Robotics's Tally now operates for Retailers including?Schnucks?(Revenue of 3.1 billions?with 112 stores),?Giant Eagle?(Revenue of $9 billions with 216 stores),?Decathlon?(2 stores in California using RFID),?Meijer?(Revenue of $20 billions with 259 stores),?Hy-Vee?(Revenue of $12 billions with 280 stores),?in the US, but also in the Middle East with Carrefour UAE (12 stores), and in (undisclosed).
PS: numbers extracted from different Wikipedia pages, my apologies if they're incorrect.
It was a tough year for associates in stores, with more demanding shoppers due to the current events. Tally has been helping them a lot. A lot of Tallys did. And we have more to share soon.
The article from Analytics Inside started with a sub-chapter "Data Collectors" saying "Robots in the retail industry are well-known as data collectors in this data-driven market. These collect more real-time consumer data as well as data of products on respective shelves efficiently without any potential error. Consumer data includes consumer buying behavior, taste and preference, demands, and many more that can drive accuracy in inventory management.". This is where the gold is when it comes to robotics, because it's the essence of any business in the 21st Century, and the gasoline of any return on investment for the Retailer. Even though data is nowadays a big trend for them, with programmatic advertising, loyalty programs and POS data collectors, Retailers have not approached yet fully the power of data they can capture from their own stores, where robots at scale have demonstrated their supremacy on the various business cases involved, mostly in the US.
Time will come for Europe and other Regions.
2021 has been a very competitive year, full of learnings, full of ifs. If a pilot last for more than a year, the ROI might be difficult to reach. If you still need human interactions on a supposed automated control of out-of-stocks and price execution, why to pay for a robot then? If your pilot is covering less than 50% of your hypermarket, how to reach the full potential of your analytics capacity? How to scale if you don't validate all the elementary factors that make a solution solid and accurate?
See you in 2022 now.