Introducing focalOS, The Operating System of Retail

Retailers have incredibly challenging jobs, they manage thousands of SKUs, employees and stores while facing margin pressure from rising labor costs and the ongoing battle with online. With Amazon’s entry into the market, the stakes are now even higher.

As the industry leader in AI-powered retail automation, Focal Systems works closely with retail executives throughout the world, and they have been begging for a better way. It was clear to Focal that the future of retail had to be built on a completely new operating system.

Focal assembled a team of retail operations experts with decades of leadership experience at Walmart, Target, Smith’s, Asda and Lowe’s and put them together with the experts building AI for major technology companies. Together, they spent the last 4 years building the next generation operating system for brick and mortar retail.

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We call it focalOS.

This operating system is a completely new, data-driven way to run your stores. It relies on shelf-mounted cameras that constantly measure the state of your shelves and use that information to create tasks for your associates and monitor the rate at which it gets done. It prioritizes work based on lost sales to ensure the most impactful work gets done first. It orders more accurately and automatically to reduce on-hand inventory and increase on-shelf availability. It recommends planogram customizations to fit each store profile and store demand to minimize labor and outs. It schedules, directs, trains, and manages your labor automatically to maximize EBITDA per store. And so much more.

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The images captured by Focal’s ShelfCam’s are processed by cutting edge NVIDIA GPUs running in the cloud to produce actionable alerts that are prioritized and sent back to store associates via a Zebra mobile device. As focalOS captures more and more data it continues to learn and optimize the algorithms to further increase the impact of the recommendations.

This system has proven itself in major retailers around the world with hundreds of stores deployed, providing higher sales and lower inventory on-hand, and delivering that with less labor.

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