In October 2018 Polish company Surge Cloud, specialized in retailmetry, is going to carry out initial implementations of stock replenishment optimization systems. A so-called smart shelf is the base of the system. It will allow sales networks, as well as manufacturers, to almost fully control the product offered in shops.
Lack of data about the product and the time necessary to gather it generate costs for large-scale shops and make the work of the manufacturer’s sales representative more difficult. “We want to change it, reclaim their time. Give them a tool, which will provide the data, increase the sales and allow for reducing the operational burden. It’s a win-win situation for everyone”, said Marcin D?browski, Start-Up CEO. Surge Cloud will provide shops with smart shelves, refrigerated display cases or even fridges. This will make it possible to collect in real time such data as product share and availability on the shelf, category stocking or rotation.
Different versions of the product
This solution, i.e. smart shelf which uses sensors informing about stock replenishment (OOS – out of shelf), may significantly reduce the sales losses and increase the effectiveness of product display (the market is close to be saturated, it is more important to get good margin on the current activity than just expand, author’s note). Surge Cloud also devises (for beverage and alcohol industry, author’s note) special products, refrigerated display cases and fridges with their own data collecting systems. “The math is merciless. If a beverage manufacturer has 40,000 fridges out there, the costs of monitoring them in case someone is storing other products in them, become absurd. Usually it means several visits a month in every such place. It can be replaced with a proper IoT solution”, said Tomasz St?pi?ski-Ustasiak, Head of the Mobile IoT Solutions Integration and Modern Technologies at Integrated Solutions.
Time is the key to reducing costs
Retailmetry data analysis and providing shops with smart shelves, as well as providing manufacturers with marking tags, is supposed to guarantee an efficient verification of goods logistics and so-called facing (product placement on a shelf) in real time. The goal is to increase the sales and efficiency of the display. “We say that time is money. In retail industry time is a cost. We want to reclaim this time”, commented D?browski.
Known technology with new face
“The idea of the solution implemented by Surge Cloud has been around for a very long time”, said Tomasz Napiera?a, CTO. “Its implantation was not possible though: high costs, the level of scientific knowledge on radioidentificators scanning effectiveness, or even their size”, he added. Today, according to Moore’s law, proper components not only are smaller and cheaper, but also more common. Devising IoT solutions integrated with a furniture shop is not a melody of the past but a reality revealing itself before us. The tests of an smart shelf are about to begin and they will cover all types of shops present on the market (from so-called convenience shops to hypermarkets). The start-up from Pozna? cooperates in this field with technological partners: Integrated Solutions from Orange Poland Group – responsible for infrastructure communication, as well as with NXP, which provides remote solutions. The main investor of the Company in 2018 is Dawid Urban, the founder of Chic Group.
