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A leading Canadian grocer will pilot automated fulfillment of its buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) offering. Loblaw Inc. is building an automated picking facility to support its PC Express BOPIS service. Leveraging a hyperlocal fulfillment solution from Takeoff Technologies that functions in compact vertical spaces, Loblaw will launch the 12,000-sq.-ft. facility inside one of its GTA Real Canadian superstores in 2020. 
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Scoop.it!
The last mile is seeing disruption from new business models that address customer demand for ever-faster delivery, as well as new technologies such as drones and autonomous ground vehicles.
Farid Mheir's insight:
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.
Scoop.it!
Unleash the bots! Automation has emerged as a critical issue in the US following a 2016 election that focused largely on jobs and plans to save them. Though a significant amount of attention has been directed towards autonomous driving as a potential job killer, specifically for long-haul trucking, delivery robots appear poised to go mainstream much sooner.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT We think of robots as fixed machines that assemble cars. However, with the advances in autonomous driving we may see an explosion of delivery robots. We have seen experiments with the use of drones to deliver products (Amazon and others) and now we are seeing self driving robots appear on the streets as it is much easier to get permits for those than it is for flying objects that can crash and hurt people. This is important because delivery remains the Achille's heel of eCommerce (slow, expensive): whoever cracks this problem and comes up with a low cost and economical solution will make a killing.
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Curated by Farid Mheir
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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