Smart stock, smarter savings: automatic stock management system for Medi-Market

Read how ACA Group developed an AI-driven Automatic Stock Replenishment system for Medi-Market, optimizing inventory, reducing costs by 75%, and enhancing efficiency with a user-friendly, real-time stock management solution.

Challenge

Medi-Market wanted to optimize stock management across its 40+ stores in Belgium, France, and Italy. The goal was to reduce inventory costs, minimize expired product waste, and create a scalable, user-friendly system for store managers.

Solution

We developed an AI-driven Automatic Stock Replenishment (ASR) system with real-time updates, automated ordering, and a user-friendly interface tailored to store managers. Scalable cloud hosting ensures reliability and cost efficiency.

Approach

We conducted user interviews to customize the UI for store managers, facilitating quick product lookups and streamlined workflows. Our AI proof-of-concept revealed a potential 75% reduction in inventory costs.

Result

The proof of concept demonstrates that technologies such as Computer Vision have significant potential in environments where visual quality control is essential.

With a new application for stock management, Medi-Market wanted to optimize the stock in their stores and warehouses as much as possible. This way, Medi-Market can reduce its inventory costs and make sure there’s a lower risk to have products with an expired date in their inventory.

The new application for stock management had to be tailored to its users as well, i.e. the store managers of Medi-Market. For these users, it’s vital that looking up products in the integrated product catalog goes as quickly as possible. Additionally, Medi-Market wanted the application to be easy to understand and to use.

Moreover, with Medi-Market's plans for international expansion, the new system needed to be adaptable and scalable to support future growth.

Smart and autonomous stock management

The new application uses ‘smart’ stock management. This means that the Automatic Stock Replenishment (ASR) application determines the optimum stock required for each store based on a number of parameters. For example, the system takes the number of items sold from a previous period into account.

As soon as the stock in a store falls below the calculated minimum stock, the application autonomously orders the correct products in the correct quantities from the warehouse until the optimal quantity of stock has been reached again. Our proof-of-concept that uses artificial intelligence (AI) demonstrated the potential for Medi-Market to reduce inventory costs by an impressive 75%. 🚀

User-friendly application with a clean UI

Store managers can also use the smart stock management application to:

Thanks to an innovative cloud solution based on AWS and Kubernetes, provided Medi-Market with cost-efficient hosting that scales flexibly.

The Kubernetes platform ensures correct management of the various applications, support systems and monitoring tools that run within Medi-Market. This setup allows the ASR application to run only at the necessary capacity. As soon as more or less capacity is needed or when new applications are added, Kubernetes scales the hosting up or down. Because of the uniform set-up of the Kubernetes platform, additional applications or support tools can be set up quickly without needing a lot of prior development work.

The Kubernetes platform also supports ‘auto-healing’. This means that broken hardware or a crashing machine are automatically detected and replaced, with only a minimal impact on performance or availability of the application. Using Kubernetes’ auto-healing, users can continue working without noticing any problems.

Medi-Market can also count on our expertise in terms of support. Accurate monitoring and automatic alerts enable us to intervene quickly when necessary. Since Medi-Market disconnected their old stock management application at the end of 2019, our Automatic Stock Replenishment application has been efficiently processing all stock movements.

With ASR, we now can manage our store orders in a user-friendly and efficient way. It optimizes both the creation or generation and follow-up of the different types of order. It also facilitates the follow-up of our central services. In addition, managing the stock in the stores has become a lot easier and more transparent.

Peter Bos

CIO & Supply Chain Director @ Medi-Market