Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
May 22, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- OSA DC,
or Optimal Shelf Availability Decentralized, is looking to use AI
and the Blockchain to solve retail’s biggest headache.
One of the biggest risks for a
retail business is overstocking. Just think about how much money is
wasted everyday when a grocery store has to throw
away huge amounts of food and
beverages that aren’t used.
Through an easy to use platform
with a built-in digital assistant, OSA DC is looking to solve this
for businesses as well as to improve the overall shopping
experience for customers, via its digital
assistant.
The platform will serve as a
Blockchain-based stocking system for retailers, which reportedly
means that it will include all information related to inventories,
individual orders, and overall product stock on a store by store
and company by company, basis. It’s reasonable to assume that each
implementation of the system will involve each company’s data being
kept private as anything else would raise a multitude of legal
issues.
The digital assistant will run in
connection with the overall platform, serving the specific purpose
of giving customers and retailers access to all information on the
origin of products, their ingredients, their prices, and even all
of the locations that each product has passed through.
Overall, OSA DC hopes that their
digital assistant will change the entire retail industry through
truly shifting the purchasing power back to the individual
consumer.
This is where a connection exists
between OSA DC and existing non-Blockchain projects, especially in
the grocery niche.
One specific example would be the
shift that Whole Foods has been undergoing. Their most recent
stocking system, which has been called OTS or order-to-shelf, was meant to
reduce unnecessary inventory, reduce costs, and allow employees to
spend more of their time helping customers.
One report claimed that the system
did noticeably improve food spoilage but that it also made the
stocking of each individual store even more difficult. Some
customers and employees even claimed that certain stores had
several empty shelves for weeks at a time.
In addition to this misfortune, at
the point of these reports, Amazon’s acquisition of
Whole Foods had already been completed more than six months
beforehand. Therefore, it’s somewhat logical to state that Amazon
hasn’t really figured out an answer to overstocking,
either.
The fact is, Amazon and Whole Foods
are not alone. As of now, no grocery store or retailer has taken on
a Blockchain-based stocking system at full-scale.
OSA DC’s future platform appears
promising due to its decentralization and due to its claims that it
is based on an existing platform which has already generated $1
million in revenue. On top of this, OSA DC states confidently that
this product has already
helped companies like Danone, LOréal, Coca-Cola, and
several others to increase their sales by an average of 5.4
percent. It’s therefore reasonable to state that they aim for their
Blockchain platform to do the same or better.
It should also be made clear before
going any further that this existing platform was termed a
“hybrid,” which means that it wasn’t a completely decentralized
product. OSA DC’s current product, therefore, is not exactly new
but can be thought of as more like the next, decentralized
iteration of something that’s already been running.
It’s also important not to forget
the role of AI in this. With OSA DC’s digital assistant,
consumers who use the network to find product information and
therefore purchase products, will be rewarded in crypto coins. Any AI system needs
to be fed training data and this is exactly what this is. In other
words, real-time data about what customers are looking for and how
much they are looking for it, will allow the system to
intelligently learn what to stock and when to stock it.
In the end, the promise of better
sales numbers as well as an intelligent digital assistant that will
learn to be as efficient as possible over time, is quite
interesting. When this is taken into account together with the fact
that a Blockchain is immutable, the idea could even be said to be
revolutionary. Even so, as with any product, it all depends on the
execution and the education of all of the intended stakeholders. In
other words, if customers and companies don’t understand how it can
help them and how they can use it to their advantage, then there’s
no chance of this succeeding.
By: BGN Editorial Staff
News:
Optimal Shelf Availability
(OSA) Decentralized
AI
Blockchain
Blockchain