Robotic deployments represent a crucial step towards smarter retail environments.
Having the ability to automate storewide grocery store shelves scans for out-of-stocks and price compliance will eliminate arduous manual tasks, especially given each store’s large floor space would make a significant difference.
By Industry Week Staff for Industry Week
Covid-19 placed a huge spotlight on the broken and often far too manual supply chain serving today’s grocery stores. While some of the shortages were understandably difficult to predict (such as toilet paper). However, other items surely could have been much easier to avoid — if there was more transparency at the store level.
Woodman’s Markets is working to address this issue in its engagement with Badger Technologies, a product division of Jabil, to deploy multipurpose robots throughout Wisconsin and Illinois with the goal to expand to all 18 Woodman’s locations by the end of 2020.
For most retailers, including Woodman’s, the reality is that there just is not sufficient time to monitor in-store inventory effectively. Given that Woodman’s stores are quite expansive with upwards of 100,000 items, it would take weeks to manage this process manually. Not only does automation dramatically speed the process, it enables the team to connect shelf-scanning results to department, category, vendor, sell-through and pricing data to identify the most important inventory on which to take immediate action.
For instance, they can perform an impact analysis of out-of-stocks to identify “High Flyers,” which represent fast-moving inventory to ensure they are re-stocked prior to peak shopping hours. Moreover, they can gather timely insights into what’s trending, so they can prioritize replenishment lists as well as manage commodities and vendors with frequent stock issues.
The robots, equipped with Badger Retail InSight, are part of a complete retail automation solution that is enabling Woodman’s to elevate store execution, lower operational costs and increase store profits. Additionally, Woodman’s can take advantage of critical trending data to better forecast and manage commodities and vendors with frequent stock issues.
