Today’s Internet savvy consumer has any number of options to find, compare, price and buy products, from cars to clothes to computers and more. It’s this shopping smorgasbord, and the online computing that enables it, that is transforming buying habits. But in order to capture wallet share of the new consumer, retailers need to rethink and refine online sales functions, order fulfillment and distribution models and visibility into and management of their inventory and supply chain processes.

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Point of sale (POS) data has long been the domain of the retailer that collects it. It hasn’t always available – in detail, anyway – to manufacturers and suppliers that could use the data for such things as demand planning, improving supply chains to avoid stock outs and to better understand and act on buying habits so they can more accurately allocate advertising dollars. Of course, all those benefits would in turn benefit the retailers, which could improve planning and forecasting, reduce (or eliminate) stock outs, and even have leverage to enact and enforce service level agreements with suppliers.

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I’ve covered supply chain and third-party logistics (3PL) automation technologies for years. There’s been a variety of “cool” solutions, many of them featuring robots, RFID, sensors and the like. But many of these solutions labor in the shadows of mainstream logistics operations, and some aren’t even that lucky. RFID – arguably thanks to the Wal-Mart mandate in the early 2000s – has perhaps made the most inroads. But there’s another automated logistics solution that’s getting some attention, and it comes in the form of little orange bots. Read more...