JapanRetail and e-commerce2024 – ongoingValor Holdings
AI demand forecasting and automatic ordering for deli items
Valor's deli trial with SoftBank's Sakimiru cut waste 18% and ordering time 27% at 31 stores
Problem
Deli items have a short shelf life, so ordering too much creates waste and ordering too little causes stockouts. Store staff also spent time on daily orders.
Approach
Chubu Foods, which runs the deli departments in Valor's supermarkets, used SoftBank's Sakimiru. The system forecasts store customer counts from footfall and weather data, combines them with POS data, shelf life and campaign information, and proposes order quantities for about 100 factory-made items. A trial ran from January to May 2024 at 31 stores and one factory. Automatic ordering started at 76 stores in June 2024, with all 242 stores planned in fiscal 2024.
Results
Takeaway
The reported gains came from a five-month trial in 31 stores, and the wider rollout was still a plan when SoftBank published them.
Categories
- Size
- Large enterprise
- Industry
- Retail and e-commerce
- Business function
- Logistics and supply chainProduction and quality
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- Predictive analytics and ML
- Adoption
- Vendor solution
- Evidence
- Vendor case study
Sources
Source summaries
SoftBank announced AI automatic ordering for deli items at Super Market Valor, run with Chubu Foods and the Japan Weather Association. It reported trial results from 31 stores between January and May 2024 and said ordering started at 76 stores in June 2024. It said expansion to 242 stores was planned for fiscal 2024.
Full details are in the original sources.