Nowadays, department stores face several challenges like the growing success of online retailers. The biggest advantages of bricks-and-mortar retailers are their personal service and their ability to create an outstanding customer shopping experiences. On the other hand, the biggest disadvantages are growing rental costs and the split between different sales channels. It is going to be vital for retailers to keep their stock lean and coordinated across various sales channels.

A lean stock leads to more space for displaying goods and hence contributes to a better ROI of expensive rental prices in prime locations.

Moreover, good real-time stock management creates accurate information for staff and customers. Ultimately, staff can spend more time on the shop-floor selling goods rather than searching them in the storage room and customers receive reliable information across all sales channels which affects their shopping experience positively.

What do you need to do?

A camera system monitors the storage room continuously. Based on the cameras we have developed a software that is capable of performing various tasks. Firstly, it detects free shelf-space and can determine its size. Secondly, it detects goods automatically and stores the location without the need of any physical tags like barcodes or RFID chips. This is achieved by applying various machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence principles. The collected data is made available on a screen, so that employees instantly see where the merchandise is located inside the warehouse and how much stock is left. Moreover, we make the data accessible online through our cloud system for enhanced ordering processes. This guarantees that products are always available while keeping the stock lean.

Lastly, we use face recognition to detect the faces of employees which grants certain individuals access to the storage room. The system automatically tracks who removed certain goods at what time to prevent you from any unwanted stock shrinkage.

Birdee allows for great flexibility and enables the store to perform advanced analysing techniques with the aim to have the goods available that your customers want. Simultaneously, staff spends more time selling and less time in the back of your storage room, trying to find requested merchandise.