Ubica: support for the trade

Digital twin - Ubica

The store is closed, only the night lights are shining. Everything is quiet. Suddenly the silence breaks, noises can be heard. Are burglars at work here?

No, not burglars. Instead, a robot about two meters tall rolls through the aisles. Equipped with a stable base at the bottom and a long neck at the top for scanning the shelves, it moves from shelf to shelf, pointing a spotlight and camera at the products on display. Its job is to sift, measure and count.

Pressure on the boiler

Retailers are having a hard time. On the Internet, customers can buy from the comfort of their own homes. But they can't find products they can touch there. And no advice either.

They can get both in stationary stores. However, if stores want to remain competitive, they have to pay attention to costs. A large proportion of these costs are accounted for by store logistics, which account for around 50 percent of the costs of the entire supply chain. 

A picture illustrates this: The average assortment of a German supermarket comprises between 10,000 and 50,000 items. In practice, it is impossible to keep track of them all: Customers take products and put them back in the wrong place. Other products fall on the floor or are stolen. As a result, article inventories in the merchandise management system are incorrect. A purely manual recording of missing stock is very time-consuming and not practicable in retail. Other solutions are needed. 

The start-up company Ubica Robotics thought that other solutions were needed and quickly developed an intelligent robot for retail. This project recently won the euRobotics Technology Transfer Award 2022 and the EHI Foundation's science prize for best start-up. Perhaps it has the potential to revolutionize retail.

Please quite friendly

The self-controlling robot is still busily moving along the shelves. It shoots thousands of photos and evaluates them using AI image recognition. The machine notes the position of the shelves, price tags and items and counts the stock. By matching price tags and packaging, it even recognizes whether products are sorted correctly. From this information, it creates a digital twin - a virtual image of the store. The data stored there gives employees a quick overview of missing or incorrectly placed products. This ensures timely reordering, for example. If necessary, the robot also works with heuristics. This means that it makes an estimate from available master data such as the height and width of a product. Based on this estimate, employees later take over the exact counting. 

Colleague, not a rival

The Ubica robot is designed to support employees, not as a rival. The "Talents4Retail 2021" study by the retail institute EHI shows that the search for suitable specialists for stores is becoming increasingly difficult. For example, 80 percent of the responsible HR officers surveyed said they were finding it difficult to fill vacant positions for store specialists. In such situations, any relief from work is welcome. While the machine takes over tedious tasks such as zero counting, the employees can concentrate on the essentials: customer service and advice.  

Wide range of applications

There have already been projects on robots in stationary retail in the past. However, it was important to Ubica to design a robot that was not designed for a specific use case. Rather, the declared goal of the project was to create a digital store twin that could be used for a wide range of applications. For example, the virtual image of the store can be used to optimize shelf layout and customer interaction. Intralogistics can also be improved in this way. This is elementary for the retail sector. In 2021 alone, retailers lost 4.1 billion euros due to inventory discrepancies. The reason for this is faulty deliveries, theft, or even defective goods that are not recognized in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The digital twin can also be used, for example, to calculate the shortest routes for picking click-and-collect orders and to display the item location on the employee's smartphone.

Another benefit is that the data stored at Ubica allows time series analyses. Predictive analytics methods can also be applied to the large databases. This makes it possible to extrapolate future sales. Procurement is more targeted, unnecessary inventories are avoided. As a result, capital commitment costs are reduced and freed-up capital can be used to liquidate short-term liabilities.

Plans for the future

Ubica Robotics has big plans for the future. Already today, retailers can benefit from the use of the robot. But a further optimization is already planned: the connection of the robot to SAP. Ubica is receiving support from IT specialist and SAP expert Nagarro. "Synergies could be realized on both sides through an exchange with SAP (for) Retail. For example, Ubica could take over the article master data from SAP. This would ensure a uniform database. In exchange, the robot would provide more accurate data on actual inventories. This also improves the quality of the data in the SAP system - without the need for time-consuming manual corrections.explains Stefan Gerum, Director Digital Transformation Retail at Nagarro.

Electronic dreams

The sun slowly rises. The first employees enter the store. The robot has done its "day's work. Important preparatory work for the morning inventory has already been done - and gives the employees enough time to deal with the customers who are arriving.

It is now bedtime for the machine. In the hustle and bustle of the morning, it would only be a nuisance. In the evening, however, work begins again in the background.