EXCLUSIVE: Sam’s Club’s Senior Director of In-Club Products Discusses Three Game-Changing Improvements to Workforce Management Tech
Sam's Club is elevating the employee experience through a range of enhancements to its mobile apps and digital tools.
Ben Ellison, Sam’s Club senior director of in-club products, highlights the transformative impact of these technologies, specifically the MyClub, Own Your Inventory, and Fresh apps.
As Ellison shares, these additions and build-outs play a crucial role in boosting operational efficiency, freeing up associates and managers for value-added tasks, and ultimately enhancing the overall member experience within Sam's Club.
MyClub
First up, the MyClub platform serves as a space to access the vast amount of data – which is particularly useful for overstretched managers dealing with hundreds of emails and tasks a day.
Originally conceived as a platform to centralize information for associates, MyClub has progressively transformed into a tool focused on streamlining tasks and providing personalized insights.
In its current iteration, MyClub uses machine learning to personalize actions and insights for associates based on their work group, historical data, and current tasks. Ellison describes the tool as "hyper-focused on making it simple for our associates and managers.”
Ellison also doesn’t rule out the potential future integration of generative AI to enhance user interactions.
In fact, generative AI is an area that Ellison, like most, is most excited about tapping into as time goes on, specifically with regards to the seamlessness of information through a more “interconnected future" – the often-mentioned “single source of truth” – and the rate at which this information can be processed and made useful.
“It's about helping our associates as the world is getting more complicated. The business is getting more complicated,” Ellison says. “We're selling more through every club. So we're really trying to just supercharge our associates with the data on hand that they should have had yesterday. We have it. We're creating it. We need to make it clear to them in a very easy-to-use simplistic way.”
Own Your Inventory
Ellison discusses the evolution of inventory management at Sam's, focusing on streamlining processes for associates in the Own Your Own Inventory mobile app, which delivers automated, personalized actions and reports from the scanning tower to associates.
- Sam's Club's Inventory Management History
- Sam's Club first introduced AI for inventory in 2022, marking the world's first commercial application of inventory scanning technology, the company says.
- The initiative first retrofitted nearly 600 scrubbers with artificial intelligence capabilities.
- The cloud-connected towers autonomously capture data around stores, analyzing product localization, planogram compliance, product stock levels, and pricing accuracy.
- Today, these scrubbers can capture of 22 million images daily.
- These images yield inventory data, empowering associates to maintain optimal stock levels and accurate pricing.
- "This innovation helps associates keep the products members love in stock and accurately priced, giving associates more time to focus on what they love most: taking care of members," the company said in a statement.
Initially, Ellison says, basic data updates were used to manage inventory. This evolved into a method where associates focused on specific sections of the store – termed the "4 by 4" process – to ensure accuracy. To optimize this, machine learning algorithms were introduced to identify potential issues with product availability.
The latest development is the implementation of an inventory scrubber, capable of capturing and analyzing 22 million images daily across the chain. This technology visually identifies problems with products, enabling associates to address issues as efficiently as possible. By leveraging machine learning and visual inspection, associates can concentrate on resolving actual issues.
"Now, our associates can be focused on fixing actual issues for our members, and not wandering the club looking for things [to solve]," Ellison shares.
Fresh App
Lastly, improvements have been made to the Fresh App, which helps associates determine the quantity of products needed for the day and streamlining the production process.
“The Fresh tool tells our associates what’s needed, based on a forecast. Looking at all our historical sales and different times of year, seasonality, different events that are happening in the area, what we expect to sell across all of our products. This makes it much easier to manage for associates, as they know in the morning they have a list of what they need to produce versus going out to the floor trying to figure out how much they need to fill the space and guessing at what they're going to do. A lot of our things, such as bread, need to be proofed overnight. Certain things – like chicken – have a certain amount of time they need to cook for. So, to be able to predict that all ahead of time, all of which makes for a much smoother experience for both our associates and therefore our members,” Ellison shares.
The ultimate goal of the Fresh App is to optimize the workflow for associates, ensuring that they have the necessary products available to meet member demands while minimizing waste and maximizing efficiency, Ellison says.