Is anyone up to discussing business ideas? Hardware for eGrocery operations.
Hi everyone,
For over 8 months I’ve been working with supermarkets helping them to launch quick-commerce delivers and boost profitability in the e-grocery segment. Everything through technology that we create at Instaleap.
I noticed that one of the crucial parts, that has a significant influence on profitability is the picking process. This part usually is time-consuming and costly due to labor costs. At the end of the day, the inefficient picking process eats into supermarkets' margins, which are really low.
Only by improving the picking process, retailers can see a significant margin increase, and they can handle more orders without hiring new pickers (lower labor cost = higher margins).
Through our technology, we can boost various operations (picking, delivery, etc.), but I noticed that if we'll add hardware parts to it we can boost efficiency even more.
What's the idea?
The idea is to create hardware parts for supermarkets that will simplify the picking process and will complement our technology, and integrate with it. As the 1st product, I would aim for electric shelve labels that will blink near the products that have to be picked as the next one (it can reduce picking time by 5-10 seconds per item - the employee doesn't have to look through the shelve for a specific product).
5-10 seconds doesn't seem like a lot? Let's take an example:
Some supermarkets have 4 000 online orders daily * 20 SKU's = 80 000 items to be picked from shelves daily. If retailers can save 5 seconds per item they can save up to 111 hours/day.
Why we won't create it in-house?
Instaleap focuses on building great software, not hardware. It's not our core business, and won't be in the near future.
Is there a market for that?
eGrocery market is steadily growing, more supermarkets are investing in online grocery shopping, aiming to be profitable in the near future. There is a competitor that does it with success, which is a good sign.
Problem?
I'm into B2B business development and a little bit into B2B marketing. I have no clue about coding and building hardware that will integrate with the software.
I'm leaving the topic open for any suggestions, questions, comments, or eagerness to talk about it in priv. Especially with those who have experience in building "hardware" startups.
Best,
I'm wondering whether that idea really scales.
Is there a limited universe of products that would need to be 'picked' and therefore would need to have such a hardware shelf tag added, or would it be necessary to apply such a tag to each and every product in the store, in the unlikely event that every product could potentially need to be 'picked'?
Have you considered alternate approaches, such as 'augmented reality' to get the 'picker' into the right general shelf location? Would that potentially save lots of seconds per 'pick', without requiring as much hardware (and accompanying software and infrastructure) investment?
Or other alternatives such as identifying the products that have the highest probability of having to be 'picked', and setting up a separate stocking and shelving and picking process for those, to get the maximum benefit, while not doing anything special for the products that have a lower probability of being picked?
Keeping products stocked in the proper supermarket shelves is probably hard enough without also having to sync hardware tags with those shelf locations (and some kind of planning and/or tracking system would be needed, rather than just standalone hardware tags). A large store probably offloads the responsibility for shelf stocking to vendors, rather than using their own employees to do it - wouldn't the vendors need to somehow participate in the shelf tagging process? Also, shelf locations aren't necessarily static, with end-cap displays changing frequently due to promotions (weekly sales, etc.). So the logistics for handling the shelf tagging would be dynamic rather than static.
It's an area in which I have no experience or expertise, so I'm just spitballin' though...