How Simbe's Tally Robot Saves Grocers $200K+ Per Store

Hello, everyone, this is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm Man Mazinga.

And we are coming to you live from the Symbi and Omnitalk Retail podcast studio at the Spartan Ash Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

And it's day two of the conference.

Bright eyed and bushy tailed the Food Solutions Expo.

The Food Solutions Expo.

There are some solutions at this expo, I have to say.

And there's some food too.

And some food.

Some food and some solutions.

But yes, but without further ado, I'd like to introduce our first guest of today, and that is Marty Reeser.

Marty is the senior Director of Customer Success and @CIMBI.

Marty, welcome to Omni Talking.

Thanks for joining us.

Great to be here.

Thanks for asking me.

Marty, I want to start by telling our audience a little bit about your career path because it's really special and unique.

You were the regional grocery VP of Global Op.

You were a consultant, you were regional grocer vp.

You were the global food ops at Whole Foods.

That was one of your many roles.

I can't even say them all steeped in grocery.

But now you're leading customer success at Symby.

I'm curious, what drew you to Simbee and to kind of help, you know, improve retail through robotics?

Yeah, great, great question.

I'm going to say back in 2017, when I joined Whole Foods is when I started to get interested in robotics.

What peaked it for me?

What peaked it for me was actually back in 2015, a friend of mine had a robotics company in Philadelphia and he was helping blind people with internal navigation.

And I said, internal navigation?

You mean in a house?

Yeah, couldn't we do that in a store?

And he's like, yeah, that might be cool too.

So started talking about it back then.

And then I brought that out to Whole Foods and asked him to come give me a sample of where kind of where he was at in his journey.

And then I found out about what Schnooks was doing and Dave Seck was doing it.

Schnooks and said, well, I gotta ask Simbi to come out and show me what they're doing too.

And then I was blown away by what they had compared to what my friend had.

And we're still friends, but I'm way more impressed with what Simbi did.

Well, they just were further along maybe.

Exactly.

So I take two borrows out of that story.

Good things can actually come out of Philadelphia.

That's number one for sure.

And number two, you got inspired by robotics.

All right, so to that last point we've been hearing, we talked to Caitlin Allen yesterday of Simbi.

Based on the recent report, the second report they've done annually with Coresight, they're saying that 70% of retailers are losing up to 5% of their sales typically from in store execution issues.

What is causing that day to day, in your mind, as someone that understands the grocery industry as well as you do, it's interesting.

I think this year's number was about 20 to 25% higher than last year's.

Right.

So.

So it continues to grow and I think the issue becomes execution in the store.

We ask a lot of our associates in the store, we ask a lot from a merchandising standpoint.

So we have multiple displays, we have multiple ways to get product into the store, whether it's single case or it's shippers or it's pallets.

And so how that product gets to the shelf sometimes gets lost on the associate.

And the importance of keeping the shelf full when they know they have a display up.

I would also say that there's some supply chain challenges.

Right.

We've gone through a lot of things since the pandemic, but also from a forecasting standpoint, we haven't really gotten as good maybe as we could be.

And I think what we're offering gives you the opportunity to see what's happening on the shelf today and it gives you a better chance to understand what you need tomorrow.

And if I'm the CFO and I'm looking at the raw financials of this martyr, what in your mind, where does the value come from?

Like both in the short term and the long term, like what are the buckets of value that robotics creates for the CFO and the grocer now and in the future?

Yeah, I think the first bucket comes out of the store operationally.

We're going to help you with price accuracy.

Number number one.

Number two is on shelf availability and that on shelf availability to again to grab those sales that you mentioned that we're losing.

That's US sales significant amount of money.

And I'm going to say that a recent study that we saw is at least a couple hundred thousand dollars annually for each store that we can help impact quickly setting up SIMBI and setting up tally in your store.

And then long term, once you get out of the store, I think the big unlocks are going to come in merchandising, marketing and promotional funding with vendor management and collaboration.

Because now that you've got all the information in your store, can you share that with your partners, are they able to more efficiently run their factories, more efficiently run their logistics, get you the product that you want, when you want it on the display that you're telling them that you're going to put up for that sale?

I think it's going to work just splendid.

Well, Marty, talk to us a little bit about, you know, once they've, once a partner has deployed Tally in the store, what are some of the metrics then that they should expect to see?

How do you define success for some of those partners?

Yeah, easy metrics for us are price accuracy.

So we really improve your overall price.

Accuracy, mostly both promo and everyday price.

Right?

Everyday price to begin with, promo second.

But yes, for us, we start with the base, the standard price first and that we can improve that almost 90% in most cases.

So that's a quick impact.

The second piece then is on shelf availability.

And if you can have more products on the shelf for sale, you're going to see those sales increase.

And we've seen sales increase typically around the 2% range for the stores that we're working with long term.

Got it.

So what challenges do you typically run into as you're trying to implement Tally?

The challenges are just about the same with anything else that you do in life, right.

It's never the tool or the process that is the solution.

It's always about the change management piece.

And are you willing to make some changes in how you approach things and how you look at the world?

Are you willing to change the way that you do your day to day work and some of the work disciplines?

So we help by coming in, working with the stores in a pilot environment, side by side with them, setting up, help setting them up with workflows, new workflows, and incorporating that into the day to day.

So that tally just becomes a tool that they use every day just like they would a box cutter or just like they would anything else in the store.

And that's what we strive for.

Tally becomes a tool that you use every day.

Yeah.

You know, Martin, the interesting thing too, we always get asked like, how do you digitize the store?

And people always, when, you know, first they start thinking about E commerce, you know, to answer that question, or digitizing the retail operation, I should say.

But it's so much more to that, right?

Like Tally is the tool to digitize the data in the store to understand what's happening.

But then you have to digitize the flows of communication across the organization too.

And both of those are equal parts required to be successful.

Right, That's a great point.

Once you get the information, how you get it from out of the store into the other elements of your business is really important.

And how you share that with your vendors is even more important.

So when we think about what AI can do for stores with.

Because this is a ton of data that's coming out of the store, so you need something to help you with it.

But AI is going to need open communication between your database and your vendor databases.

So think about how you're architected and when you have the.

The chance to upgrade that and open that up to a way that you feel comfortable sharing with your vendors, it's going to be a big win for both sides of it.

Right.

Well, let's close, Marty, with talking about an award that Simbi recently won.

You were named the number one in robotics and engineering by Fast Company.

Congrats.

First, that's a huge accomplishment.

Where do you see retail, automation, robotics, Simbi kind of going as you head into the rest of the year, what's the future look like?

What are you excited about?

Yeah, I'm most excited about taking it from operations, just kind of our store base.

And hey, we've got the shelves really disciplined.

We understand the data that's there is good.

And now you can take that and leverage that into the rest of your organization, specifically into merchandising, category management and being able to bring some efficiency there, then into vendor relations.

We're working with clients right now where DSD is a huge unlock for them to say, I can provide information for you about how my store is serviced.

It's not just my feeling about how you're serving me.

It's an actual picture.

Data to match that.

Right.

Data to match that up.

So, yeah, I'm excited about where it's going.

Out of the store, into merch, demand planning, supply chain, and maybe even some into asset protection as well.

Wow.

Okay.

Spoken like a true grocer, my friend, from a merchandising perspective.

Love it.

Love it.

Yes.

Well, thank you so much, Marty.

Thank you all for joining us today for the day, the second day of the Food Solutions Expo.

And thank you again to Cimbie and Spartan Nash for hosting us here today.

We'll be here all day.

We've got tons of interviews headed your way, so until our next interview, be careful out there.