Smart Inventory

Real-time inventory retail store demo digitizes inventory to reimagine retail processes. RFID sensors track every movement of every tagged item from the stockroom to the store front and at point-of-purchase. The Smart Inventory dashboard provides more accurate store inventory levels based on near-real-time insights and helps to maintain adequate stock levels by triggering the reordering process when needed.

Smart Inventory enables a new way of working with inventory to help retailers provide a better shopping experience for customers. It eliminates cycle counting, automates receiving, improves productivity, and, most importantly, increases customer face time.

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Problem space

Given the immense scale of products and choices available today, consumers expect a better experience from retailers. According to reports, 70% of buying experiences are based on how a customer feels he or she is being treated, and 2 in 5 consumers have not completed a transaction or made an intended purchase because of poor customer service.

For retailers over-stocking and out-of-stocks cost globally $1.1 trillion per year, with around 70% of stock outs caused by poor shelf replenishment practices. On top of that, internal employee theft accounts for 34.5% of inventory shrinkage.

Solution

SAP & Intel have joined forces to collaborate on solutions to extend and enrich the digital core and help retailers run live. The first part of this co-innovation aims to improve in-store customer experience at fashion retail stores by leveraging RFID to make in-store business processes more efficient.

To make the design intent real, SAP brought together a tightly-integrated Agile Scrum team made up of engineers, developers, information architects, designers, and project managers, along with resources from Intel, adapting its development approach to compliment the partner's specific technology standards.

KEY PRINCIPLE – OUT-OF-BOUNDS ALERTS

A store manager doesn’t need to know when things are going well, so Smart Inventory keeps track of products movements and triggers alerts when necessary. All alerts are accessible via dashboard. Consequently, we defined the baseline state for each tile to only show abnormalities as they occur and require action.

Key Features

Some of the challenges that we aimed to address were to highlight RFID technology within the retail space, innovate inventory management processes, map out the possibilities for future evolvement, and seamlessly translate retailer's pain points into opportunities for our design.

To tackle that, as a team, we decided that Smart Inventory should address 3 major use cases:

1. Misplaced items
2. Shipment receiving
3. Inventory shrinkage