At Ocado Technology, we're the innovation factory behind cutting-edge automation software and hardware that power retailers like Ocado.com. When Ocado started 20 years ago, it had a vision to use technology to transform the grocery industry and improve the lives of our customers. It was a tall order: margins in the grocery industry are tight and it's a complex business getting food picked up and delivered perfectly to customers' kitchens. Today, our partners on every continent have purchased the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), from Japan (Aeon) to the United States (Kroger) to Australia (Coles) to France (Casino) and beyond. We built 54 (and counting) of our highly automated warehouses around the world for our partners. There was no standard product, so we focused on creating in-house solutions, from the ground up, to address the complexities of online grocery moving, storage, sorting, picking, packing, and delivery. Unlike general merchandise, the grocery store has three different temperature regimes: frozen, refrigerated, and ambient. Delivering an order of ice cream and fruit to the customer in perfect condition is more difficult than delivering electronics. We have developed advanced capabilities in both hardware and software, bringing together areas like AI, simulations, robotics, and automation to solve many of these challenges. We were able to make great strides quickly in this area because unlike other highly regulated industries like automotive or aerospace, the grocery industry allows for a tremendous degree of experimentation, which means you can learn incredibly quickly. We see ourselves as a 20-year-old startup: we pride ourselves on collaboration and take risks from day one. This mindset allows us to shape the future of online grocery shopping.
How does the Ocado Smart platform work?
OSP is a single end-to-end logistics, fulfillment and e-commerce platform. It is based on AI, ML, robotics, cloud, Big Data and IoT. OSP covers an online store, native applications and voice commands, to our highly automated warehouses and a highly optimized last mile smart software package.What are some of the unique aspects of your platform?
In our distribution centers, thousands of robots move in a giant grid to pick customer orders. This grid, known as "The Hive", looks like a huge chessboard. Under each square is a stack of storage containers that hold groceries. The orchestrated robots rotate around the network at speeds of up to 4 meters per second, coordinated by our AI "air traffic" control. This year, we also launched new robotic picking capabilities that pack items into customer bags using computer vision suction cup technology. This level of orchestration means we can pick a 50-item order in just five minutes and get food from the vendor to customers in less than 5 hours. This means that food is remarkably fresh when it reaches our customers and in the last 12 months only 0.038% of the total product has been wasted before reaching the end customer, compared to an industry average of 2-3%. . Last Mile is powered by AI and ML to optimize several thousand routes in real time, taking into account things like traffic, idle time, and the size of each customer order, to avoid naming a few.How has Covid-19 changed the landscape?
The past few months have obviously seen a tremendous acceleration in customer demand for online grocery shopping. Retailers around the world expect this demand to continue. They want smart solutions to actively accelerate and scale their online offerings so they can deliver fantastic service to their customers when they need it most. This means that on our side there is no slowdown. We were very happy to launch two new online delivery offerings for our customers during the lockdown: Casino in France and Sobeys in Canada, now delivering to customers via OSP.Can you tell us about the areas in which you seek to innovate?
Looking to the future, we don't like to sit still. We are constantly testing and optimizing all of the features of OSP to ensure that we provide the best possible experiences for our retail customers and their grocery customers. A good example of this is some of the AI-powered hyper-personalized product recommendation engines we've implemented in our online store, to help retailers tackle food waste by better presenting the best deals. relevant to our clients. Another example is the new AI strategy we have developed to further optimize our slot reservation and routing algorithms so that delivery emissions are kept as low as possible while maintaining tight time windows. for deliveries. Our aspiration is to use technology and automation to change the way the world shops. Across the Ocado Group, we continue to invest in robotic picking, vertical farming and dark kitchens – technologies that we believe will play a significant role in the future of online grocery shopping.- Hannah Gibson, Director of Product Management at Ocado Technology.
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