The big idea - the case for connected shelves

Recognizing the Challenge

Many inventory and distribution problems are accepted as a fact of life. Retailers accept stock-outs, spillage, or shrinkage as the cost of doing business. Distributors or operations managers simply accept the occasional unexplained stock deviation and the need for workarounds or rush orders.

Despite efforts to prevent or address stock issues, such as counting, intensive care with frequent manual checks, or analytics to predict demand and/or possible outages, these issues seem persistent. Getting the right products, in the right place, at the right time has been the holy grail in supply chain management and operations. There have been huge advancements in planning systems, smart procedures, and recently the boost of AI in forecasting and planning. Still, challenges remain huge.

Rather than decreasing, there are a few trends that actually increase the incidence of errors. Just think of the rise of autonomous retail ('self-scanning is no-scanning' where people 'forget to scan'), shortages of available personnel, more SKUs, or more assortment changes causing erratic demand patterns, and limits on safety stock due to space or capital constraints.

Interestingly, these issues are more pervasive when it matters most. When a promotion or a new SKU is launched, and CPG invest to get a rotation, share, or profit boost, you might end up selling out much quicker than anticipated. Your sell-out data might make it look like a huge success, while potential to sell more remains untapped. Or, variances in location and timing might be lost in the averages, post-hoc analysis.

Or when a medical specialist needs a scissor for a simple procedure and it’s not available, she ends up searching for it, walking the halls, asking colleagues, and ultimately wasting valuable time that could have been spent on her patients. The product could have been easily located if she had simply known where products are located.

The need for sensing shelves

The root cause is a basic lack of visibility of actual transaction and stock movement – at the point of usage or conversion. If you could simply see where you’re running low, you can simply use this in your replenishment strategy to pre-empt outages rather than scrambling to address a shortage.

Dark distribution keeps your operations in the dark ages. There are over a billion shelves and storage locations in Europe alone that are ‘dark’. A simple system is needed that can sense what is happening on your shelves or stock-keeping locations to improve your operations.

MOOS is on a mission to solve this.