Big Four supermarket Asda green lights full store roll-out of Retail Insight Inventory Insight solution

Asda has extended its technology partnership with Retail Insight, a provider of store operations execution software, with a view to improving on-shelf availability and the in-store experience.

The tie up involves a full store roll-out of Retail Insight’s Inventory Insight solution.

Asda now operates over 800 locations across its UK wide store estate - from supercentres, superstores, supermarkets, Asda Living stores, petrol stations and depots, and serves 18 million customers every week. 

With its significant store footprint and the sheer number of SKUs it stocks, it has inevitably felt the impact of inaccurate inventory and wanted to improve stock accuracy across its store network. 

Retail Insight has been supporting Asda’s in-store operations since 2009, leveraging its suite of solutions to improve replenishment and availability. 

Seeking a scalable solution, Asda partnered with the company to tackle phantom inventory, conducting a pilot in July 2023. 

This drew foundational store data from across its estate, which enabled fast implementation by leveraging the same data sets, and combined it with Retail Insight’s latest cognitive technology solution, Inventory Insight. 

This is a machine learning driven software that identifies and corrects inaccurate retailer inventory records to drive store performance. 

Using a blend of AI and ML  algorithms, and human subject matter expertise, Inventory Insight trained a data model for each of Asda’s stores, leveraging sales and inventory data to detect instances of phantom inventory. 

It then alerts store colleagues to manually validate the stock at the shelf-edge and update the inventory file to help drive total store performance, correcting inventory accuracy, and improving product availability and sales. 

In the nine months since deploying Inventory Insight, Retail Insight says it has removed over 1.6 million units of phantom inventory from Asda’s store estate, delivering a 63x return on investment to the retailer. 

Following the pilot, Asda will now conduct a full roll-out of the solution cross its store network.

Neil Fairclough, Senior Director of Retail Transformation at Asda, comments: “The ability to accurately identify phantom inventory across our estate is a huge advantage for our business, and goes a long way in enabling us to deliver a better in-store experience for our shoppers.”

“Given the impressive results we received at trial, we were excited to conduct a full roll-out of the Inventory Insight solution. We have not been disappointed by that decision with metrics that have exceeded our expectations.”

Wesley Mellor, Customer Success Manager at Retail Insight, says: "All retailers have a problem with phantom inventory, and the majority are looking to find a solution for dealing with it in an efficient and scalable way.”

“Our solution was a perfect fit and we could draw on our extensive experience of Asda's in-store operations. It's been fantastic to work with the Asda team to deliver this project, with some fantastic results." 

Retail Insight says it will continue to work with Asda to further refine its solution, including building automation enhancements into its inventory record.