Upgrade your store to a “Self-Driving Store” with FocalOS.
Focal takes the power of self-driving cars and unleashes it to automate and optimize your stores, from inventory management, supply chain management, category management, e-comm management, labor management, and more.
FocalOS is the most comprehensive, hardened, and proven AI-based operating system for brick & mortar retail.
Take it for a test drive today!
Focal’s Shelf Cameras digitize your sales-floor, backroom, and top-stock hourly
Focal has developed a ruggedized, cost effective camera that scans your shelves hourly, allowing you to know exactly what is on your shelf.
By monitoring your shelves 24/7/365 with enterprise-grade, cost effective AI-powered cameras, we provide accurate and actionable information that feeds FocalOS to “drive” your store for you.
Focal’s AI runs on each image to detect ins, outs, lows, and more
Focal has developed the most accurate Deep Learning Computer Vision models in the retail industry, trained on over 1.4 billion labeled images captured from retailers around the globe from over one hundred thousand deployed cameras. First, these AI models scrub the images of all PII (Personally Identifiable Information) so no customer or employee image data is ever retained or tracked. Then, these AI models accurately scan ins, outs, lows, planogram non-compliance, restock events, and spoiled produce hourly. This data is fed downstream to all other applications to “drive the store” for you. If the AI scans an out of stock with inventory in the backroom, FocalOS adds the product to the picklist in Action Tool in order of Lost Sales. If no backstock, FocalOS orders more product instantly. Finally, all restock events are tallied up per associate, so you can track productivity down to the associate per hour, automatically.
Focal’s AI digitizes your backroom and topstock hourly
Focal has developed a high-resolution, cost effective camera that scans in barcodes and QR codes from over 20 ft away, allowing you to know exactly what is in inventory hourly. This enables the first of it’s kind “Computer Vision-based Perpetual Inventory System”.
By scanning backroom, topstock, primary, and secondary locations hourly with state of the art AI, your IMS will never be more accurate.
This permits accurate and real-time ordering, guided and speedy restocking, and labor productivity tracking that would otherwise never be possible.
This feeds FocalOS which then “drives” your store for you
Welcome to the most full-featured, hardened, easy to use, Operating System for Retail.
Powered by real-time and accurate shelf digitization of your entire store, FocalOS drives the most mission critical functions of your store.
Stockers are automatically assigned tasks ranked by lost sales to ensure stockers are working the most important tasks first. Assortment becomes adaptive and streamlined, allowing merchant and operations to focus on insuring a positive customer experience for in-store and on-line shoppers alike. E-comm is instantly updated to eradicate substitutions and hunting for ghost inventory. ocalOS enables C-suite, Corporate and Store Leaders to view stores and regions in real time. Orders are updated to be 100% truck to shelf.
FocalOS’ “Self-Driving Store” drives huge labor efficiency gains, incremental sales and (most importantly) EBITDA and NPS!
1 - FocalOS automates Ordering based on what the cameras see on the sales-floor and backroom
Imagine if you had your team perform a wall to wall scan of your store every hour of the day, everyday, in every store. How much more accurate would your ordering be? That is what Focal’s real-time shelf digitization enables.
FocalOS scans your shelves and updates IMS hourly. This prevents over- or under-ordering which drives inventory and shrink down, and labor productivity way up.
This also allows you to track productivity of your day crew and night crew down to the hour.
2 - FocalOS automates and optimizes Stocker management with real-time, prioritized tasks
Focal’s shelf cameras are constantly updating FocalOS with the most real-time view of your stores. This feed Focal’s Action Tool which rank-sorts the outs by lost sales to ensure your team is always working the most important outs first. Once the stockers work the out, FocalOS validates that the work was done correctly and provides feedback automatically if the work was not done correctly. This dramatically improves stocker productivity.
3 - FocalOS automates and optimizes Category Management by adapting Shelf Allocations per store to changes in supply or demand
Focal’s shelf camera data feeds AdaPOG (adaptive planogramming) to stop outs at the root. Over half of out of stocks are formed because of either Known Supply Issues or because of “Chronic Outs” which stem from poor alignment between demand and shelf capacity. These are both very preventable issues. Focal’s AdaPOG adapts individual store POG's to shifts in demand/supply automatically to grow sales with less labor automatically.
4 - FocalOS automates E-Comm platform management and eliminates substitutions
Substitutions are the #1 reason for churn in e-comm and with Focal can be completely eliminated. As Focal’s shelf camera scan outs hourly, FocalOS immediately updates your e-comm platforms to turn off product that is not available for sale to ensure customers are not disappointed.
Additionally, substitutions are the #1 reason for e-comm picking inefficiency. Picking 80% of the products takes only 40% of the time, but searching aimlessly for ghost inventory that is “somewhere” in the store takes the remaining 60% of the time.
If Focal’s cameras do not see it on the shelf, or in the backroom, FocalOS will turn it off, eliminating the substitution.. If the cameras see the product on the sales-floor or the backroom, FocalOS will guide the e-comm picker to exactly where it is, saving them time on the “hunt”. Its the simple.
5 - FocalOS automates and optimizes stocker management
What if you could visit all of your stores in just an hour, “teleporting” into any store in seconds to see for yourself what is going on in your stores?
What if you had unbiased, accurate measurement of productivity for all of your stockers every hour of the day?
With FocalOS, now you can.
FocalOS allows you to see live images of your shelves from anywhere in the world. Additionally, because FocalOS tracks restock events, FocalOS knows exactly how many outs and lows each associate has correctly implemented every hour of the day.
This frees you up to go manage, rather than to constantly travel, hitting stores trying to debug what is going on in your stores.
ROI CASE STUDIES
Case Studies proving Focal causes a 50x ROI
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“With the advances Focal has made with their technology solution, we’re ready to expand the partnership and deploy shelf-cameras in more stores. We’re always striving for more ways to improve the shopping experience for our customers. Focal is helping us use technology to improve our on-shelf customer availability, so our customers can find what they are looking for, each time they choose to shop in-store with us.”
— Sam Wankowski - Chief Operations Officer, Walmart Canada.
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“Zebra is investing in companies that accelerate our Enterprise Asset Intelligence vision to deliver exceptional value to our customers. As a technology solutions provider to many of the world’s leading retailers, we have heard our customers tout the benefits of Focal as an effective solution for solving out-of-stocks. We believe Focal has superb talent and a deep understanding of the challenges retailers face, positioning them to be successful in this market. As with all Zebra Ventures portfolio companies, we see opportunities to collaborate with Focal to help support our customers.”
— Tony Palcheck - Managing Director of Zebra Ventures, Zebra Technologies
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"AB has partnered with Focal Systems to track out-of-stocks for our brands in convenience stores. The data we have gathered using their technology has supported our efforts to quantify the impact of out-of-stocks and optimize product mix on the shelf. The ability to track this data continuously throughout the day has also provided us a new lever for identifying shopping trends across stores."
— Andrew Green - Director of Strategy and Innovation, Anheuser-Busch InBev
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