SPECS 2026: Managing facilities and procuring materials the smart way
Whether by using artificial intelligence or applying proven merchandising strategies in other areas of the business, retailers can get "smart" about their physical retailing activities.
At Chain Store Age’s recent 62nd annual SPECS Show held in National Harbor, Md., speakers at two sessions focused on different ways retailers can take an intelligent approach to facilities management and materials procurement.
Here's an overview of the two presentations.
Applying AI to facilities maintenance
In a session titled "Innovations in Facilities Maintenance," Casey O’Connor, senior director, EY, discussed how artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in real estate and facilities maintenance.
"The back office is where we see most AI being deployed in real estate, automating processes that are currently manual," said O’Connor. "These include looking at multiple quotes or contracts that come in from subcontractors or vendors and throwing them all into a large language model and asking it to identify the top 10 risks of all of these if they are within 10 or five percent of a certain dollar figure."
O’Connor said retailers should think of their real estate and facilities maintenance AI as being contained in three buckets: data generation, data aggregation, and data action. Data generation includes building automation systems like IoT sensors, indoor air quality, and people sensors for footfall analytics.
"Pushing that data to a centralized repository is the data aggregation piece, and this is where the data gets structured use cohesively across organizations, potentially at an enterprise level," O’Connor said.
According to O’Connor, the data action level is where retailers ingest data and perform analysis, such as with dashboards or visual graphs to better understand, where they should focus their facilities management efforts.
"This is where things actually start to happen from a data perspective," he concluded.
Look to merchandising for materials procurement
Retailers obtaining the necessary components to construct stores should look to strategies and processes they have honed through their merchandising efforts. Liza Amlani, chief merchant and principal, Retail Strategy Group, and Richard Honiball, adjunct instructor, retail & marketing executive, George Mason University, examined this topic in the session "Materials Procurement: Navigating Supply Chain Challenges."
[READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Materials matter in your supply chain – here’s why]
"Whether you're trying to build an assortment or you're trying to build a store, the commonality is the same," said Amlani. "The methodology is, what elements can plan in advance? What elements can you agree upon?"
Amlani cautioned the audience that different stores have different needs.
"We heard on Target's latest earnings call a few days ago that they're looking to create larger format stores that have a hub for fulfillment," she said. "Ikea, Best Buy and Bloomingdale's are creating smaller concepts that may not require as much of an assortment depth or breadth. That is all going directly impact store design, store planning, how much inventory is going to be allocated to that store, and of course, merchandising, planning, and marketing."
Amlani also advised that organizational silos and disconnects can prevent retailers from executing materials procurement strategies according to plan.
"There are lots of workarounds, lots of band aid and duct tape solutions," she said.
Honiball said that retailers should include taking friction out of store operations, as well as out of the customer experience, should be a focal point of retailers’ “store of the future” efforts.
"What we found was that we had to eliminate things in order to move forward," said Honiball. "We had to look for common fixtures. We had to look for things that were more flexible."
