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The company is developing an autonomous mobile robot to increase the efficiency of the restocking process in supermarkets. The target market is medium to large supermarkets that get 1500+ pallets of products delivered per week.

The company is aiming to introduce these mobile robots into brick-and-mortar supermarkets, which do not have the revenue to be able to change the layout of the store to introduce the automation that is currently being used with click-and-collect stores. The company’s product will introduce a level of automation to these stores, that will allow for current supermarket layouts to remain the same and that will work alongside people in the store, to increase the efficiency of the restocking process, and ensure good customer experience to maximise customer return.

Today large pallets of products are brought from the storage area of the supermarket to the main store, and then redistributed onto trolleys and brought to their required restocking location in the supermarket. The total time the product spends travelling is 15 minutes per pallet, which is a total of 26,000 hours per year for a single medium to large supermarket.

The restocking process happens both at night and during the day. The night time restocking process is time critical, and the staff have a huge amount of stock to restock, which often results in them not having time for a break. The day time staff have a lot of different tasks to perform: restocking, attending the till, cleaning, attending to customer needs and so on. This results in stock not always being present on the shelves.

By introducing mobile robots into these stores to alleviate some of the workload, they can A) give more time back to the staff so that they can spend more time ensuring the supermarket is kept in order and increase customer experience, and B) help stores reduce costs in doing so.

Mobile robots have currently not been introduced into supermarkets to carry out this type of task, because the technology and the algorithms behind this technology have not been to a level that would have been acceptable, to ensure the level of safety required. The company has a large amount of experience working with mobile robots in all different kinds of environments. This experience gives them an advantage as they know what to look at when performing risk assessments of a particular environment and bring these learnings back into the development of the product. Their experience in this field allows them to select the most optimal hardware technologies and algorithms, to perform the required tasks in a manner that ensures the highest level of safety.

In addition to selling the product on a per product sale, they plan on leasing our product on a Hardware as a Service (HaaS) business model. Supermarkets are high capital low margin businesses, with major costs roughly divided as follows: Till attendance - 30%, restocking - 25%, store care/presentation - 15%, bake-off - 10%, storage area - 6%, office - 5%, misc - 9%. Showing supermarket chains such as the Salling Group that savings of 200,000,000 kr can be made per year with a return on investment of 6 months, will ensure the Salling Group’s investment in our services. Not only will an investment in our product reduce cost significantly, but it will increase the focus of the staff on ensuring higher customer satisfaction and hence increase the return of customers to their stores.

Looking at Bilka stores 10 robots can be placed in each of these stores, which is a total of 36M kr revenue for the 16 larger Bilka stores. Some European chains include the following:

Salling Group = 600+ stores = 250M kr | Auchan = 3,000+ stores = 6B kr | Tescos = 6,500+ stores = 9B kr

The CEO of the company has 7+ years working in the mobile robotics industry with experience ranging from product development to product management. Their focus in this company is the strategic development of the company as a whole, low level control of the product, safety and mechanical design. Another of their team has 3+ years in the development of mobile robot navigation and obstacle avoidance. He also has significant experience in electronics design. They also have one member on their advisory board that has founded and sold a mobile robotics company, in less than 10 years, and has extensive experience in the industry.

Questions for the panel

What strategic issues / themes should the panel discuss during the Springboard (3-5 topics / issues)

Enter topics or specific questions.

1.Things to think about and plan for over the next 2 years of the company development.

2.The type of business that this company is in requires a significant amount of lead time for customers to be converted. What are the strategic steps of getting these customers to commit.

3.Partnerships & initial revenue creation

4.Go-to-market strategy