Data: Strengthening the Retailer-CPG Relationship - State of the Retail Industry 2022

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Ushering a New Era: Next-Gen Retail Solutions

By Jason Hosking, co-founder and CEO, HIVERY

Responding to 2021’s Challenges

By Brad Bogolea, CEO, Simbe Robotics

Data: Strengthening the Retailer-CPG Relationship

By Will Salcido, CEO, Bedrock Analytics

Embrace AI or Perish

By Francois Chaubard, CEO, Focal Systems

When is 'Optimization' not Optimal?

By Barry Grange, CEO, Retail Express

The Time for In-Store Robots is Now! Don't Delay

By William “BJ” Santiago, CEO, Badger Technologies

Redefining Retail: Blending the Online and In-store Experience

By David Sprinzen, VP of Marketing, Vantiq

Responding to 2021’s Challenges

By Brad Bogolea, co-founder & CEO, Simbe Robotics

For retailers to continue to grow and thrive while facing a new, diverse set of challenges, data and automation will be the key to their success.

By Brad Bogolea, co-founder & CEO, Simbe Robotics

Brad Bogolea is CEO and Co-Founder of Simbe Robotics, where he is responsible for the company’s vision and execution of its leading automation solution for the retail industry. In November 2015, Brad brought to market the Tally robot, the world’s first autonomous shelf auditing and analytics solution to help retailers ensure merchandise is always stocked, in the right place, and correctly priced. The NRF Foundation, the non-profit arm of the National Retail Federation (NRF), has named Brad to “The List of People Shaping Retail’s Future.”

Prior to Simbe, Brad spent 10 years in the energy and wireless sensor industry. Most recently at Silver Spring Networks, Brad led global product management and business development efforts for their energy management and data analytics platform for energy utilities. Products under Brad’s leadership allowed the world’s largest utility companies and their energy consumers alike to gain efficiency and visibility of their energy usage through smart sensors and data.

Over the past two years, the retail industry has gone through seismic changes. In wake of the pandemic, consumer demands changed, online grocery gained market share, and retailers began to recognize the untenable holes in supply chains. As we head into 2022, we’ll continue to see retailers shift and adapt to face these nuanced challenges.

In 2021, grocery sales soared as more people continued to work from home and avoid dining out at pre-pandemic levels. We can expect this trend to continue in the new year as COVID cases surge again and shoppers look for ways to save money on food.

We’ve also seen a rapid rise in the popularity of online grocery shopping, too, with a number of new players emerging on the scene (and gaining large amounts of funding). While demand for services like Instacart and Doordash have increased and continue to gain footprints in new markets, it remains that the majority of shoppers buy their groceries in-person. Nevertheless, retailers will face a growing need to tap into better data to improve the customer experience in store and compete with personalized online shopping experiences. Additionally, the unpredictability of the supply chain has put more pressure on retailers to avoid out-of-stocks and have suitable alternatives readily available.

While the pandemic once caused an astronomically high unemployment rate nationwide, the market has shifted and the country now struggles with a shortage of workers, making it hard for businesses to keep up with rampant demand. Labor shortages are not expected to vanish anytime soon, so retailers have started to look at automation and innovative ways to fill the gaps in lost hours. For example, automated shelf scanning and Electronic Shelf Labels are gaining relevance among retailers, allowing them to realize efficiencies in store. This frees up tasks, ensuring that labor is used more effectively on high-value tasks, such as restocking shelves and assisting customers.

Micro-fulfillment solutions have seen early traction in the market but require large initial investments to integrate in large-format stores. In a margin-constrained business like grocery, hefty up-front investments will be scrutinized for return on investment ahead of mass roll outs.

It’s no question that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a massive impact on the retail industry and as a result, companies are looking for new solutions that will enable them to adapt. For retailers to continue to grow and thrive while facing a new, diverse set of challenges, data and automation will be the key to their success.

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07/05/2024 16:08:51

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Uncertainty is the New Normal: What Retailers Need to Focus on Now

By Mikko Kärkkäinen, CEO, RELEX Solutions

7 Trends Reshaping Retail Experience

By Tim Srock, CEO, Mendix

Real Time Analytics in Retail: The Key to Drive a Seamless CX

By Poornima Ramaswamy, EVP, Qlik

5 Trends Reshaping the Retail Landscape

By Omar Akilah, Corporate VP, Blue Yonder

CPG Industry: Prepping For What's Ahead In 2022

By Wei Lin Wong, President – IRI

Levelling the Playing Field for Independent Retail Businesses

By Doron Friedman, Chief Product Officer, SpotOn

Self-Service: Enhancing Customer Experience

By Michael Jaszczyk, CEO, GK Software USA

Collaborations, Profitability & Quick Commerce

By Neil Moses, CEO, Wynshop and Mi9 Retail

Data: Strengthening the Retailer-CPG Relationship

By Will Salcido, Co-Founder & CEO, Bedrock Analytics

The need of the hour is for CPG brands to leverage data, generate genuine insights and guide their retail partners on where the market is shifting toward.

By Will Salcido, Co-Founder & CEO, Bedrock Analytics

Will Salcido is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bedrock Analytics, a leading data analytics software platform for CPG manufacturers. He has a demonstrated history of working in the software and consumer product goods industries, experienced in Business Management, Board Governance, Marketing, Sales, Category Management, and Venture Capital Funding. Previous to Bedrock, Will was Head of Analytics at Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, and led the deployment of his own BI solution at Lindt & Sprüngli, across 12 countries in a global analytics leadership role. He has also worked in category management and data analytics at Nestle, and Novartis.

For the retail & CPG industries, both 2020 and 2021 saw massive instability in supply chains, consumer demand, labor shortages, and raw ingredient pricing due to the global pandemic. A key takeaway is that brand loyalty matters more now than it did in the recent years since consumers are looking to maximize their experiences with quality, innovation, or tradition. Looking into 2022 requires a more granular approach as there are pockets of opportunity for the retail and CPG industry.

We’ve worked with numerous category leaders in both CPG and retail through our work at Bedrock Analytics to help them see around the next few corners. Dependability has become table stakes for retailers as they attempt to keep store shelves stocked while satisfying a quickly fragmenting shopper base. E-commerce has quickly become an alternative channel for consumers. The way that retailers can combat this is to invest in their own ecommerce strategies while taking a stand for key consumer groups within their stores by making their stores a destination for these groups. The old playbook of forcing shoppers to walk the perimeter of a store to find what they came for will have to change. We expect new store layouts with innovative signage and merchandising concepts to enhance the shopping experience.

Data has become essential in an uncertain environment. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine learning (ML) have quickly become more reliable for making sense of retail data. The overload of information and data we all have at our fingertips presents an opportunity for retailers and CPGs to understand consumers at an unprecedented level. But with the influx of disparate data, retailers don’t have the bandwidth to mine through it and generate the insights they’re looking for. Retailers will likely expand their partnerships with their CPG vendors that can deliver actionable insights. A category review and shelf refresh has never been as important. Some brands have the tools to deliver retailers with guidance and others have to wait and see if they were selected to be on shelf.

It’s only going to get more complicated. There are more data sources, more channels, and more D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) options. We’ve reached a point now that it is no longer possible for humans to analyze it all. Knowing what retailers and their shoppers want is vital. Leveraging data so that CPG brands can guide their retail partners on where the market is shifting toward will separate the vendors from the partners.

The retail industry will continue to adapt to the changing marketplace — but it’s those retailers that collaborate with CPG partners that leverage data and generate genuine insights who will drive the greatest mutual business growth.

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07/05/2024 16:08:51

The New Retail Model: Real-time Decision-Making

By Helena Holmgren, President and CEO, Pricer

Digital Transformation: Accelerating Omnichannel Capability

By Jim Barnes, CEO, enVista

Business Agility: Thriving in an Uncertain World

By Melissa Wong, Co-founder and CEO of Zipline

Flexible Retail Pricing is Crucial in 2022

By John Gilbo, Retail Pricing Expert, Pricefx

When Guests Arrive Early to the Retail Party

By Dheeraj Shah, Global Head, Algo Retail, TCS

Physical Shopping Experience: At the Cusp of a Major Shift

By Michael Gabay, co-founder & CEO, Trigo

The Carousel of Progress

By Stan Zylowski, cofounder & CEO, Movista

Raising the Bar on the Employee Experience

By Sanish Mondkar, CEO & Founder, Legion

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Embrace AI or Perish

By Francois Chaubard, CEO, Focal Systems

Amazon's systems will adapt within minutes. Will yours?

By Francois Chaubard, CEO, Focal Systems

Francois Chaubard is the CEO of Focal Systems, an AI company that builds Deep Learning Computer Vision solutions to automate brick and mortar retail. Focal Systems works with 15+ of the largest retailers in the world and our technology is deployed in stores on three continents. Prior to founding Focal Systems in 2015, Francois worked at Apple as a Deep Learning Researcher and as a Missile Guidance Algorithm Engineer at Lockheed Martin. Francois attended Stanford University where he earned two master degrees in CS and EE.

Your car can drive itself, why can’t your stores? Over the past year, I’ve asked this question to executives of almost every major retailer around the world. A few retailers really have this figured out, but frankly the answers I hear from over half the retailers leave me concerned for the future of the retail vertical and market concentration. They have no plan.

Put simply, the retailers that are enacting top-down "AI mandates" to adopt automation and AI solutions chainwide by 2025 are going to crush the retailers that don't. These retailers will offer significantly lower prices and better customer experiences with AI. It is happening right now and it is creating an insurmountable competitive advantage.

Entering 2022 retailers continue to face major head winds from ongoing supply chain challenges, labor shortages and margin erosion from e-commerce growth. The game is just getting harder, not easier. And most retail executives do not understand AI at all, so instead of running to AI, they run to their previous playbook, which is throwing labor at the problem. But it’s not working because of the labor shortage which experts say will continue for 5 to 10 years. This is a very real problem. The retailers that get it are aggressively and quietly investing in systems that automatically adapt to changes in real time; AI-based systems that are smart, like self-driving cars.

Self-driving cars can set a course, and adapt along the way as traffic changes, to road closures, if someone swerves into its lane, etc. Most retailers today set their planograms a year beforehand. And have no system to change it monthly, or daily and definitely not on a per store basis. That is not adaptive. That is not "smart". If there is a known supply chain issue in one area of the country, how quickly does your ordering system adapt to change course and order the next best available item to ensure you have a product to sell? How quickly does your merchandising system adapt to adjust shelf allocations on a per store basis and ensure you are maximizing sales per square foot in all stores? How quickly does your task management system adapt labor schedules and priorities to ensure associates are working on the highest value task? How quickly does your system adapt to panic buying ahead of a snowstorm or lockdowns? I know Amazon's systems will adapt within minutes. Will yours? Or does yours depend on a bunch of very manual steps that will take months to react.

Just as self-driving car digitizes the world around it and making millions of micro decisions every second to adapt to the real-world, a retailer needs AI systems to digitize their store in real-time to automatically make all the key decisions in the store like ordering, merchandizing, labor scheduling, and task management to maximize sales, labor, and EBITDA. AI can do all of this better than today's systems.

I am watching this movie play out as we speak. A handful of retailers have already begun to roll out these automation solutions with staggering results. 60% reduction in labor spend, 20% reduction in inventory, 50% reduction in shrink, 2% subs on e-comm orders vs. 30%, 10% increase in on-shelf availability, 5% increase in sales. This isn’t fiction. That is what you can achieve with real-time AI systems. The other retailers are too focused on the urgent to get to the important, too busy chopping trees to stop and sharpen their axe. I am very concerned that this will result in an insurmountable competitive advantage and consolidation—the magnitude of Amazon displacing Radio Shack, Toys R Us, and Circuit City. Similarly, these early adopters will slowly soak up all the market share available and the others will be forced to sell. Mark my words, in 2022 and 2023, we will see massive consolidation if retailers do not aggressively invest the profits they made from COVID into AI and automation.

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07/05/2024 16:08:51