The Record - Issue 19: Winter 2020

139 R E TA I L & HOS P I TA L I T Y “Retailers need accurate real-time visibility into their inventory and end-to-end supply chain” to where it is needed most,” she explains. “It will also enable them to develop new order fulfil- ment services, such as home delivery and buy online pickup in store.” US-based supermarket chain Kroger, for instance, has harnessed the power of OneView Commerce’s headless-retail-as-a-service plat- form and transaction engine running on Microsoft Azure to build a new kerbside pickup service at its own stores, as well as for Kroger product collections at Walgreen’s pharmacies. This has expanded Kroger’s store footprint for pickups, allowing it to fulfil online orders quickly and easily for customers across the country. Other retailers are turning to micro-fulfilment centres (MFCs) to expedite the online order ful- filment cycle. “Most retailers take one of two approaches to fulfil online orders – they either have employees picking items fromwithin the store, or they oper- ate large centralised warehouses where orders are picked and then delivered to stores or customers’ homes,” says Rajagopalan. “The problem with the first approach is that it’s difficult to ensure stores have sufficient inventory available for both in-store and online customers. The problem with the latter is that centralised warehouses require significant real estate, so they are expensive to build and often located far outside of urban areas, which increases delivery time and costs. Now MFCs are offering automation to expedite order picking and they’re built using rows of compact vertical storage shelves, so they’re small enough to be installed at the back of store or other urban spaces that are close to customers.” Israel-based start-up Fabric, for example, has developed a micro-fulfilment solution that can run on Microsoft Azure and uses robotic pickers to select items from vertical stacks of totes and place them in self-driving carts that deliver the complete order to an employee for distribution. Israeli drugstore chain Super-Pharm already uses Fabric’s technology to process more than Micro-fulfilment centres with automated robotic solutions are becoming more popular with retailers and CPG firms as they look to expedite online order fulfilment