Iván Hernández Dalas: Simbe for Merchants suite offers retailers chain-wide visibility
Simbe for Marchants includes ‘realograms’ — realtime diagrams of what’s actually on store shelves. Source: Simbe Robotics
In addition to scanning shelves for retailers, robots and software can now provide inventory insights to help merchandising teams. Simbe Robotics Inc. today introduced Simbe for Merchants, a suite including “realograms” — automatically generated, to-scale diagrams of what’s actually on shelves — along with real-time planogram dashboards and chain-wide visibility into product placement and availability.
Retailers lose 5.5% of sales and 5% of margin to in-store inefficiencies, and shoppers cite out-of-stock items and pricing errors as top frustrations, according to recent Coresight Research and shopper survey data. On average, planogram execution is just 60%, costing retailers billions of dollars annually, reported DataSense Market Research.
“Retailers win or lose at the shelf, yet actual shelf visibility has always been limited to spot checks and occasional store visits,” stated Tom Gehani, vice president of product at Simbe. “With Simbe for Merchants, merchandising teams have access to the daily insights they need to ensure the right products are where they belong, displays are set right, and vendors are aligned on execution unlocking measurable sales and margin gains.”
“We started as a robotics company, and we’re really more of a shelf-intelligence company now,” he told The Robot Report. “We started with the Tally robots, but we also now have the Tally Spot shelf-mounted camera. It’s a teammate to Tally, and they can pass information back and forth, capturing data more frequently.”
“We offer both computer vision and RFID capabilities,” Gehani added. “The robot knows where it is in the store, and our RFID reader can also tell you where your products are, unlike other fixed infrastructure providers. We use a variety of mechanisms to gather data across more than several hundred stores worldwide.”
Simbe for Merchants gives insights across stores
New features in Simbe for Merchants use that inventory data. The product has features including Multi-Store View, which instantly compares shelf conditions for for any product, brand, or category across stores. It is designed to facilitate assessment of execution of new items, seasonal sets, and vendor programs without travel.
To develop Multi-Store View, the company worked with large retailers and multiple sites, ranging from a downtown Manhattan store with limited freezer space to a suburban Minnesota one with multiple aisles, recalled Gehani. Not only does Tally constantly generate its own maps of each store, but it also reads the actual environment, he said.
“We are scanning every tag on shelf, identifying the location of every product — not just where the planogram thinks it should be, but where it actually is,” Gehani said. “We capture pictures in every one of a merchant’s stores and can show, ‘Here’s an identical item in every store. Here’s where it actually is in every store around the country,’ and how that looks.”
He added that individual stores within a retailer’s network might rearrange pallets or end-cap displays, so Tally and Tally Spot can provide reliable data without the retailer having to look for exceptions themselves. Manual scanning is not as regular, thorough, or reliable, and associates’ time is better spent on other tasks, said Gehani.
Planogram Insights, realograms bridge theory-reality gap
Simbe said its Planogram Insight dashboards show which stores are in or out of compliance, down to the SKU, helping teams correct drift before it costs sales. Since store managers typically make major layout changes only once per year and minor changes once per month, Simbe’s technology can help them manage workflows and identify if items are actually in assigned spaces, Gehani explained.
The new realograms show near real-time item location, facings, and brand/category share. Simbe said they are suitable for resets, audits, and redesigns and do not require pre-existing planograms.
“We often see some items were not selling from a new planogram at all, and retailers don’t know why,” said Gehani. “We help merchants identify that an item never got to the shelf in the first place. They often work in the theoretical: ‘The space should look like this.’”
“But the store is the physical. It’s real. ‘There’s a pole there, I can’t fit this box of product in that position, this item keeps falling off the shelf, or it has a lot of space but almost never moves,’” he added. “Simbe realograms allow merchants to make better decisions about how are they plan spaces in the first place, especially combined with things like out-on-shelf data.”
In addition, Simbe said its vendor and brand dashboards provide centralized reporting on availability and item and store counts by vendor or brand. This can improve supplier accountability and planning for corporate, field, and vendor teams, benefitting shopper experiences across stores, noted the South San Francisco-based company.
“Simbe’s vision is to empower the entire retail team,” said Gehani. “We started with in-store operations, helping identify products that were out on shelf, and now we’re moving to merchants. In the future, you could see us moving into other spaces like supply chain, loss-prevention, and omnichannel teams, many of whom already use our data today.”
Mobile app redesigned for scrolling the aisles
Simbe Robotics has also launched Simbe Mobile 2.0, which it redesigned in response to associate feedback and modern workflows. The new app offers streamlined navigation, smarter task management, instant store health snapshots, and multi-store toggling.
“We were really excited to announce Mobile a year ago. We saw outstanding support of the product from store associates, and we believe in building products with our customers,” said Gehani. “Instead of sending a human out to scan every item and write it on a piece of paper somewhere, Tally would do those scans, and they could focus on what was needed to get products back on shelves.”
“We’ve really leaned into a differentiating factor of how visual we are. Last year, we captured 4 billion images in stores, so the updated application has a lot more imagery of the products on the shelves themselves, including price tags and promotions,” he added. “Managers are able to see the entire store at once; you can literally scroll through and see aisle by aisle every part of that space. Brand managers or district leaders don’t have to send someone to each store every week or month.”
Simbe Mobile 2.0 will be available for download in app stores next month.
Simbe sees digitization of retail accelerating
“Solutions like Simbe’s can’t just live with store operations,” said Sean Spillane, former senior vice president of strategy and real estate at Stop & Shop and a strategic advisor at Simbe. “Reflecting on my experience, I recommend bringing merchants into the shelf digitization program early. They have so much to gain from this data, and the value is undeniable.”
Simbe said its latest capabilities reflect the growing maturity of the shelf digitization space.
“Building on milestones such as Simbe’s Strategic Advisory Board and advanced capabilities for fresh departments, Simbe for Merchants leads the way as the first in a series of tailored, team-specific solutions designed to extend Store Intelligence across the retail organization as foundational data infrastructure that powers modern AI initiatives,” the company asserted.
“The grocery industry is decades old, and a lot of processes are based around specific processes and automations,” asserted Gehani. “From Piggly Wiggly taking the cashier from behind the bar to a checkout line to shopping carts and credit cards, there have been moments in time when the structure of retail fundamentally changed, where you can put your shoulder to the wheel of progress and shove.”
“When I met the founders of Simbe, I saw this was going to be a similar opportunity for automation in the retail space,” he said. “Simbe is constantly pushing its vision, with the Tally and Tally Spot data-capture devices, the RFID sensing, and the intelligence of our mobile app and APIs [application programming interfaces] we offer to retailers. Our customers are helping us evolve.”
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