Our new Augmented Reality feature for associates has made inventory that plays ‘hide and seek’ a thing of the past

Every retailer has encountered the age-old problem of needing to quickly find a product held in the backroom. And with each Walmart Supercenter’s backroom holding up to 15,000 cases of product, a store associate’s ability to find and move the correct inventory to the sales floor as quickly as possible is critical to customer satisfaction.

To improve this, we took a technology-based approach and developed a customized Augmented Reality (AR) overlay that instantly maps and tracks every box in the backroom for store associates. Rather than the old method of associates manually moving and lifting boxes to read the label on each to determine the contents, the solution we built relies on camera-readable labels affixed to each box, highlighting boxes to show which items need to be moved to shelves. This technology reduces the need for manually scanning each box to find the correct one. For example, during the summer months when fans are in high demand, this AR feature can help associates quickly locate more inventory in the backroom and move it to the sales floor.

Beyond locating boxes, this capability enhances productivity by managing the number of items in each container and uses colored icons to give associates a clear visual representation of what actions need to be taken with each box.

Applying computer vision and Machine Learning (ML)

Our core services: The Item and Supply Chain Engineering Team has been working on many proofs of concepts applying computer vision to backroom and inventory management. Sung Kim, one of our lead engineers on this project who also worked on computer vision prior to joining Walmart, partnered with a team of engineers, product managers and designers. The group spent time with store associates in their backrooms and tested more than a dozen prototypes using both hardware and software solutions. The final result was a consumer-grade solution for associates that we made available on company-issued mobile devices, including cell phones.

Our AR feature is powered by and connected to the Merchandise Movement Engine (MME) developed by Walmart Global Tech. The MME looks at every inventory event happening in all stores across the country. Think of an item being scanned at checkout, picked on a shelf by a personal shopper, or freight received in the back of the store–all of these are inventory events. We see more than 10,000 inventory events per second at Walmart. To make sense of it all, we use ML to help every store predict its unique inventory trends to automatically determine when products should be shipped to the store, rather than waiting for the store to request it.

This patent-pending approach to inventory location and management has had an immediate impact in the stores where it’s already in use. The system dramatically increases speed–what previously took associates several minutes to complete now takes an average of 42 seconds.

The AR feature is currently live in ~3,500 stores and will roll out to all remaining stores this summer. I’m proud of our team for putting this magical capability in the hands of our associates and making their jobs easier while helping them better serve our customers.

This article was originally published by Srini Venkatesan on LinkedIn.