Supermarket wars hit cyberspace as Coles unveils ‘pick and pack’

Eli Greenblat
NOVEMBER 09, 2015
THE AUSTRALIAN
The supermarket wars have spilt over into cyberspace, with Coles introducing a new “pick and pack” technology for its online grocery customers.
This promises to up the ante for its battle with Woolworths by ­increasing efficiency by at least 20 per cent, reducing order errors and improving delivery times to shoppers.
Developed in-house by Coles, the new IT system, called Rover Power Pick, has been sold by the supermarket group to global point-of-sale provider NCR and is likely to be picked up around the world.
But for the Australian market it promises an acceleration of the fight for online grocery shoppers not only between the nation’s leading supermarket chains, Woolworths and Coles, but also the growing legion of websites that are also breaking into the $90 billion grocery market, such as ­entrepreneur Ruslan Kogan’s Kogan Pantry and Aussie Farmers Direct.
Woolworths and Coles have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into broadening and improving their online food offers, with both generating double-digit sales growth and attracting millions of regular customers.
Woolworths recently reported that its online grocery sales had grown more than 20 per cent this year, and the country’s biggest supermarket group has more than a 50 per cent share of food and ­liquor sales and 2 million customers. Its site gets 500,000 unique online customers visit a week, and Woolworths has also quickly created a shopping app for the Apple watch. Not to be outdone, Coles earlier this year cited 29 per cent transaction growth for its online food and grocery store.
Now it promises a jump in efficiency and speed as it implements its new Power Picking system throughout its Coles network, which directs staff through a store to find the exact location of each item within the online shopping order using the fastest and most efficient route possible. Power Picking uses a tablet-based screen and also allows Coles staff to collect goods for multiple ­orders at the same time.
“We are picking in our stores using team members, and through using our new system we think we will be able to do it in a pretty ­efficient and accurate matter,” Coles digital and financial services director Roger Sniezek told TheAustralian. “What it means is that instead of (Coles staff) traversing the whole store trying to find products, you have got them concentrating, picking bits of orders across the same area, its much more efficient and also much more accurate.”
Mr Sniezek took on digital responsibilities for Coles following a management reshuffle last year, which also gave him oversight of information technology and Coles FlyBuys program.
“We have been working on this for the last two years and the latest version of it completed in stores in the middle of this calendar year, we are using it across all 120-plus of our sites with Coles online.”
He said the new IT system for picking, packing and dispatching online food and grocery orders had generated an improvement in Coles’ delivery times to shoppers’ homes and offices.
Coles is also trialling an in-home voice recognition gadget called the “hiku” that allows shoppers to create an online shopping list through the week.
The device recognises the customer’s voice to add items automatically to a digital shopping list and is able to scan product barcodes. At the click of a button food and grocery items are added to the shoppers’ digital shopping list on the Coles app and can then be transferred into their Coles Online shopping trolley.