Businesses don’t get much more straightforward than Kroger Co., but the Cincinnati-based supermarket giant is using high-tech methods to speed you through checkout lines and prevent food from spoiling. And Chief Information OfficerChris Hjelm, the company’s head of information technology, says to look for future changes such as the ability to personally highlight products you want in the store.
Hjelm did a Q&A with Peter High, president of IT advisory firm Metis Strategy, for Forbes.com.
Hjelm’s job goes a lot further than making sure the company’s computers work right. He’s very strategic in looking at how Kroger (NYSE: KR) – the nation’s largest operator of traditional supermarkets and one of the most successful in recent years – can use high-tech methods to solve problems.
Take the age-old issue of checkout speed. Hjelm’s team came up with a solution called Q-Vision that uses infrared scanning to determine how many shoppers are in the store, how long they’ll shop and when the checkout lines are likely to get jammed. The stores then staff the registers accordingly. The result: Checkout waits have gone from an average of about four minutes to just 30 seconds.
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
“Fundamentally, we dramatically improved service with very little to no incremental labor; just sheer productivity improvement,” Hjelm told Forbes.
He’s also been able to solve food spoilage issues when compressors go out on refrigerators and freezers. In the past, that typically meant food was either spoiled or, if it was saved in time, it had to be held in the back freezers until the display case’s compressor was fixed. Hjelm’s team designed sensors that alert store managers and maintenance people if the temperature in a refrigerated case varies from its typical cycle.
“So if there’s a problem, we’re catching it within minutes and they’re able to repair these issues before there’s an impact to the product,” he told Forbes. “Think of it across 2,650 stores, with all the frozen cases. That’s a big task to have our associates do that manually, and we’re automating that task. At the time we invented that, there wasn’t any technology that could do that.”
Kroger’s future plans get even more cutting edge. Hjelm is working on a way help people quickly find the products they need so they can get out of the store faster. Imagine a colored light popping up on the product you’re trying to find.
“Think of it as a digital shelf edge,” Hjelm told Forbes. “The example I use is with customers who are gluten-free. If you’re looking at nutrition bars, we could highlight on the shelf, in your color of choice, the products that are gluten-free. Say you had a particular bottle of wine on your list that you wanted to get. Finding it in the wine department isn’t always easy, but wouldn’t it be nice if it would just highlight for you the bottle of wine that you needed to grab. We think we can shave a fair bit of time off the average customer’s shopping trip.”
Kroger plans to do even more ad targeting as well, Hjelm told Forbes. It already uses technology to track customers’ habits and tailor ads to their needs. Its highly touted partnership with DunnhumbyUSA led to its acquisition of a big chunk of that data analytics company last week, with Kroger renaming that unit 84.51°.
“We’re just scratching the surface of personalization,” he said. “Customers … give us a lot of data. They share a lot of data online and via social media. How can we use that data that they’re willing to share in a way that we can create better services? If a customer is willing to tell me that they’re gluten-free, why wouldn’t I want to share with them gluten-free products, whether it’s in a promotional advertisement or coupons to offer to them?”
Date: May 4, 2015