The Operating System of Retail

About

For over 6 years, Focal Systems has been working with Walmart and other leading retailers throughout North America to automate and optimise their stores. Focal does this by deploying a network of low-cost, accurate shelf cams that digitise entire stores in real time. The digitisation of the store eliminates the need for manual data capture and enables a concept we call “self-driving stores.” A self-driving store automatically orders products for just-in-time replenishment, prioritises tasks for store associates, adapts planograms on a per store basis and maximises on-shelf availability. The collection of these efforts maximises EBITDA and customer experience. For in-store associates, Focal’s AI engine takes the images from our cameras and uses this data to calculate what items are out-of-stock, low, spoiled or planogram noncompliant on your shelves and creates a prioritised action list directly on the associates terminals on the next best action to take. By removing the time wasted walking the aisles counting stock, increasing the accuracy of your inventory system for reordering and optimising your replenishment team actions, you can get the fullest shelves possible with the least amount of labour. Focal real time shelf data allows eComm platforms to be updated with exactly what products are available in each store preventing your customers from having a negative experience by purchasing items that can’t be filled that result in cancelled orders or substitutions. Focal data enables the merchandising team to maximise sales per square foot by automatically adapting planograms on a per store basis based on known supply issues and chronic outs. Not all stores are shopped the same, so it does not make sense to produce one size fits all national planograms. Focal’s AdaPog module is similar to a high frequency trading system that identifies microresets that should occur on a weekly basis that will reduce labour spent replenishing the same items, improve on-shelf availability and drive higher sales. And that very same data costs your DSD partners millions of pounds to collect, which gives Waitrose a potential alternative revenue stream of providing them access to the data and images captured in your stores. We have retailers generating significant revenue from this model today. And then for the management team, we provide a series of dashboards that allows them to virtually transport themselves to any store and view the status in real-time. They can compare different stores/regions, see which ones are in need of additional help and ensure that when external factors like we saw recently with the pandemic, that they have the knowledge to implement changes, based on real data. Most retail supply chains today are dependent on stores keeping up with inventory management system updates which are labour intensive and inaccurate. With Focal digitising your sales floor and backroom we are automatically keeping track of what inventory you have on hand and where it is. When we detect an out-of-stock or low item on the sales floor we confirm whether it’s in the backroom, if not we order it and it goes direct from truck to shelf. The system reduces shrink and increases productivity by eliminating over-ordering while also increasing on-shelf availability by better managing what inventory is available in the store. Implementation of our system is very fast with a whole store being switched-on in a single night (all of which is handled by Focal so you can focus on driving results) and ROI is fast with a typical store cost less than that of one full-time employee. We would welcome the opportunity to have you take our solution for a test drive to prove the potential impact for Waitrose.