Grocers Leverage Inventory Management Automation to Boost Efficiency, CX

As supply chain issues rack the grocery industry, businesses are challenged to find new ways to improve inventory management, becoming more efficient and preempting challenges where possible.

See also: Freight Costs, Labor Shortages Worsen US Grocery Shortages

Minnesota grocery chain Lunds & Byerlys, which has 28 locations in the state, announced Tuesday (April 19) the deployment of a new computer vision- and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered shelf scanning solution created by retail technology company Pensa.

“We’re excited to deploy Pensa’s innovative shelf intelligence solution throughout our stores so that we can ensure that when our customers walk down our aisles, the products they love are on the shelf,” said Lunds & Byerlys Senior Vice President of Merchandising Curtis Funk in a statement.

The system is intended to remove the labor required to manage inventory as well as boost accuracy, offer more up-to-date information, and improve transparency for customers shopping via eCommerce channels.

“We’re very excited to partner with Lunds & Byerlys, a premier grocery brand, to provide a highly accurate and near-real time view of what’s actually on store shelves, right now,” said Pensa Systems President and CEO Richard Schwartz in a statement. “With Pensa, both brands and retailers can take a constant pulse, at scale, of store shelf and retail channel performance, bringing the physical store shelf online for the next age of retail.”

This is not the first time that a grocer has implemented AI to improve inventory management. As far back as January 2019, one retail automation company, Badger Technologies, was announcing that 10 retailers (mostly grocers) were testing its shelf data collection robot.

Read more: Robots Tasked With Restocking Retailers’ Shelves

One year later, Walmart announced that it would be bringing shelf-scanning robots to 650 more stores after an initial test, although the company had reversed course by the end of 2020, finding that human labor was just as effective.

See more: Walmart Reboots Retail With Its Re-Think on Robotics

This past August, St. Louis-based grocery chain Schnuck Markets announced that it was bringing Simbe Robotics’ Tally inventory management robots to all 111 of its stores.

Read more: Schnuck Markets to Roll out Robots Chainwide

The following month, Iowa-based supermarket chain Hy-Vee, which operates over 240 stores throughout the Midwest, announced the deployment of the same technology at locations in Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri.

See more: Hy-Vee Joins Grocers Optimizing Labor With Automated Inventory Management

Improving inventory management not only makes operations more efficient for grocers, it can also help preempt issues on the consumer experience side, according to research from PYMNTS’ January study “Decoding Customer Affinity: The Customer Loyalty to Merchants Survey 2022,” created in collaboration with Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions. The report, which drew from the results of a census-balanced survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers, noted that 51% of grocery shoppers said ensuring that the products they want are in stock and available for purchase is key to their continued patronage.

Get the study: The Customer Loyalty to Merchants Survey 2022