Smart tech applications drive growth for Sam’s Club

Can’t find the Red Lobster cheddar biscuit mix at Sam’s Club? Just ask the floor-sweeping robot.

IT Brew caught up with the bulk-discount behemoth’s SVP and chief product officer, Tim Simmons, who told us how the retailer thinks about technology and uses it to solve problems for both members and employees.

From implementing “scan and go” capabilities that let shoppers tally up their cart via a mobile app to improving real-time inventory tracking, Simmons said his team looks at customers’ biggest hurdles toward having a seamless shopping experience and then works backward.

“We focus on members, on big member pain points. We try to really fall in love with that problem and understand what’s the most impactful thing and solution we can do,” he said.

Help! I can’t find the olive oil! Locating items within the seemingly endless aisles is a persistent challenge in a warehouse-style retail environment, Simmons said. It’s also one of the top drivers of complaints when customers can’t find what they want.

Under Sam’s Club’s legacy inventory system, employees would have to leave the sales floor to look up the item in question in a database and print over a dozen “inventory exception” reports explaining an item’s disappearance. The reports didn’t include any ranking or prioritization, so an associate had to start from the top and try every solution.

“It’s really inefficient, didn’t set our associates up to succeed, and frankly, didn’t really make a dent in the…number of members who said they couldn’t find their item,” he said.

Now, Sam’s Club uses simple algorithms that rank the importance of those inventory exceptions and returns the results through a mobile app.

“Using some basic AI and machine learning to help our associates understand, ‘Of all these things you could do, what are the best things that you should do right now?’ dramatically reduced the load of working inventory,” he said.

Paging the robot on aisle 4. If an item is still hiding, the store can call on its secret weapon: the floor-scrubbing machines.

Simmons’ team custom-built RFID scanning towers that are bolted onto the machines, employing AI and computer vision to continuously update product specifications as the machines travel around the store.

“We’re getting a very accurate, near real-time read on where we’re auto-locating items,” Simmons said. “Many other use cases come out of the data that now flows through this.”

The team’s next goal? Using the same system to monitor the integrity of the pallets that hold and store products.

I’m fine! Connected devices play a big role in the Sam’s Club technology strategy, but securing those devices is another factor. The company’s central security team acts as the clearinghouse for new hardware and software, and it conducts streamlined security reviews through a documentation portal.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Simmons said the company realized it needed to quickly screen for illness symptoms. At a time when temperature checks were becoming commonplace, he said the company built its own assessment tool tied to employee clock-ins. The resulting kiosk scanned an employee’s badge, administered a simple wellness survey, and took their temperature using a built-in wrist-reading thermometer.

Both the kiosk and the thermometer were new hardware that interfaced with the workforce management system, and had to pass through the company’s security review of the microprocessors, software, and code to ensure they didn’t introduce new threats.

Simmons characterized such backstops as essential, even when a company is trying to quickly mobilize around new technology.

“As fast as we wanted to go during the pandemic to keep people safe, we took the time to go through a thorough security review.”