WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: warning! this article is not about your typical "robots will rule retail" or "everything has to be AI driven unless you die". Well, in some parts it is.

The reality check that retailers - and their technology vendors - must make is: retail is difficult, focused on the bottom line, with no appetite for innovation with short term results. Retail innovators must find a way to experiment while staying focussed on the bottom line.

Best quote: "‘I think the majority of the problems come from the unwillingness, perhaps the fear, of investing in something that
doesn’t automatically bring a load of cash onto your balance sheet."

WHY IT MATTERS: the scores and the ranking is not important. This list is meaningful because it shows just how broad and deep the automation has become in retail stores. Expect to see a lot of those in your local shopping destination.

WHY IT MATTERS: the acquisition of robotics for Ocado fulfillment centers could be seen as one more tech announcement. But buried in this Fortune article is this quote from Ocado CTO that summarizes the ultimate goal of grocery eCommerce: dark warehouses with robots doing all the work. 

This may sound very futuristic but in fact it is the consequence of the grocery eCommerce business model: the only way to make money is to have robots to the work that consumers do when pushing carts in the store.

WHY IT MATTERS: this is a huge step forward and a sign of the times: manufacturing automation. Fueled by digital, automation, and robots, this enables production of smaller batches economically. When this is rolled out at full scale - I assume it still requires development and lots of tweaking - we can expect retailers to shorten the time from idea to production. with eCommerce, it enables the make-to-order that was made popular by Dell computers in the late 1990s: onl;y build the computer when an order has been placed. Expand this idea to t-shirts and you can see why this new Alibaba production facility is so important...

WHY IT MATTERS: an article that summarizes many of the important trends of the retail transformation. Important note: this is pre-covid....

WHY IT MATTERS:  watch for robots to start making guest appearances in stores as covid post-pandemic distanciation come into effect - and as retailers have pressure to raise minimum wage. This report provides very good insights and examples of retailers that have already deployed robots.

WHY IT MATTERS: covid crisis may further put pressure on the workforce. If you had a choice between a store with humans or robots that perform most mundaine tasks - cleaning floors & disinfecting area, providing help, checkout & payment, replenishment of shelves, ... - would you prefer the one with fewer possible infection vectors? 

WHY IT MATTERS: this diagram shows well that the next improvements will come from technologies that impact the real world. We thus will move from a digital transformation to a real world transformation. Am I already obsolete with digital transformation? *sad*

WHY IT MATTERS: once we get over the health crisis, we will need to address the economic crisis. Key supply chain technologies will offer retailers and manufacturers solutions to reduce cost and their dependency on global trade fluctuations.

WHY IT MATTERS:  robots are leaving the factory floor to enter the workplace. First stop, warehouses. This new generation of autonomous robots can carry orders from one place to another, navigating against the human and robot traffic.

See this video that I shot at NRF2020: youtube.com

See this article I wrote about this (french): e-marketing.fr

See this article on these robots: ailatech.com

WHY IT MATTERS: prepare to see robots in stores and other public areas as wage increase and labour shortage for menial jobs increase. bossanova and badger robots already deployed in stores must find their place amongst the shoppers and this article explains what retailers are trying to keep shoppers from being mean with the machines...

WHY IT MATTERS: order fulfillment and delivery is the last remaining hurdle to eCommerce. Loblaws in Canada will pilot a micro-fulfillment solution from TakeOff that impressed me last year at Shoptalk. In short, they create an automated back-store where eCommerce orders are prepared with a huge amount of automation. The question remains whether the economics is better for micro-fulfillment or if centralized warehouse fulfillment with hub-and-spoke delivery is better suited for high volume / low margin eCommerce that grocery is about. Thus this "test" by Loblaws. Note that Sobeys has decided in favor of more centralized ocado-driven automated warehouse and Metro remains with the more traditional decentralized (and manual) store-based pick-pack-deliver process. Given the low volume of orders for online grocery in Canada I remain partisan of a store-based manual approach but the economics I got from TakeOff was promising. Below additional links if you want to read more about takeoff and ocado.

- http://fmcs.digital/blog/a-new-store-experience-windowless-automated-micro-warehouse-with-hyperlocal-presence-may-be-the-future-of-grocery-shopping-takeoff-solution-suggests-this-may-be-the-case-robots-ai/

- http://fmcs.digital/blog/video-of-the-inside-of-ocados-robotic-warehouse-where-thousands-of-robots-pack-groceries-retail-robots/

- https://www.takeoff.com/why-takeoff

WHY IT MATTERS: technology is tackling manpower shortage in retail. Here an example of how cameras, robots and drones are leveraged to perform out-of-stock detection on store shelves. When you realize that certain store may have 25000 or more products, the time required to identify out-of-stocks for replenishment and the lost sales makes those technologies useful and cost effective.

WHY IT MATTERS: this is a big deal because the Boston Dynamics robots appear to be the advanced and versatile. The fact that they are made commercially available is significant after years of being research project. You have to be in the market for an early device with lots of limitations but, looking down the road a few years, one has to start planning for robots to start making their way into practical use cases in construction, etc. Plus the videos are just fun to watch!

WHY IT MATTERS: the report is not available for free but the 42 slide summary is a great overview of key trends that are presented with observations and outcome.

WHY IT MATTERS: with baby boomer workforce retiring in massive numbers, robotic solutions to replace low skills jobs are well under way. The future of a fully autonomous robotic warehouse may be years away but expect to see more automation in coming years to augment & complement human workers that will be in short supply...

WHY IT MATTERS: with baby boomer workforce retiring in massive numbers, robotic solutions to replace low skills jobs are well under way. The future of a fully autonomous robotic warehouse may be years away but expect to see more automation in coming years to augment & complement human workers that will be in short supply...

WHY IT MATTERS: the survey suffers from biais as it comes from bossanova that develops store inventory automation robots. Knowing that however the report does provide insights into the most important problems and time wasting activities that store employees face and that robots can/could help solve.

The full report is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hE1fAH6wSrVSrjdkNxICvgdatl_FLQgO/view?usp=sharing 

WHY IT MATTERS: Ii find clothes folding robots to be an interesting benchmark in robots use in commercial environments. Folding clothes is a complex task as clothes come in different shapes and made of flexible materials. I've been tracking them since early 2010 where it took many hours to fold one shirt and cost 50000$ or more. At CES 2018, folding clothes machines were introduced at a cost of 3500$ but are yet to be fully commercialized. And now this 5000$ robot from UCBerkeley is another point in the trend. With labour shortages in countries like Canada, having robots perform those mondaine tasks will become important but as we see there are still a few generations before they are very cheap and widely available.

WHY IT MATTERS: with labour shortage and minimum wage increase you will see experiments like this one flourish in retail stores. Not certain that a robot like this will be helpful nor that it will meet the marketing definition of enhanced customer experience in store... But it sure will address a major pain of mine: finding a sales rep in a RONA store on weekends!

WHY IT MATTERS: this new solution from takeoff in the US proposes to build a series of automated windowless hyper-local micro-warehouses that automatically prepare grocery orders that you can pick up quickly in your car. Listen to the video for more.

WHY IT MATTERS: warehouse automation is a major component of retail ecommerce digital transformation. As more orders go online, the speed and cost of order preparation must be reduced. Amazon has invested heavily in the field buying KIVA robots in 2014. Now other retailers, especially in the grocery field, are also moving from manual picking to automation because they have the volume. In fact, this may be a sign of the future: grocery retailers may become leaders in the digital transformation, moving away from their current position as dead last.

WHY IT MATTERS: this videos shows the inside of the new Ocado warehouse in UK. This warehouse is making its way top Canada, with Sobeys opening one soon: http://fmcs.digital/blog/u-k-s-ocado-taps-into-canadas-online-grocery-market-with-sobeys-tie-up-is-canada-mature-enough-to-have-automated-grocery-fulfillment-centers-ecommerce-robots/ 

WHY IT MATTERS: delivery is the last problem to solve to continue ecommerce growth. McKinsey explores the different delivery models for the last mile in this article.

WHY IT MATTERS: the USA will bring back manufacturing from emerging countries - but it will not bring back jobs. This article is one more example of this trend: robots are now cheaper, faster, and generally better than humans at doing repetitive tasks. So much so that robots can manufacture clothes better than humans can. See the videos here: http://softwearautomation.com/digital-t-shirt-workline/

They say factories of the (near) future will have only one employee and one dog: the dog is there to keep humans out of the building, and the human is there to feed the dog! ;-).