A Welcomed Solution to the Retail Industry’s Myriad Problems

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OSA DC is building a network that will revolutionize how retailers, manufacturers, and consumers interact, setting a new standard for supply chain operations and consumer goods management.

Spelled out, the project’s acronym stands for Optimal Shelf Availability Decentralized. For the retail industry, optimal shelf availability refers to a retailer’s ability to keep its shelves adequately stocked on a consistent basis. As it stands, stores lack access to reliable data or methods to maintain an optimal inventory, nor do they have adequate business strategies in place with manufacturers to properly manage their supply chains to this effect.

These inefficiencies plague revenue potential and gut bottom lines, both for store owners and manufacturers alike. But even more so, consumers gets the short end of the stick, as they either don’t have access to the products they want, or they have to pay extra on other products as retailers mark prices up to compensate for product waste.

This is where OSA DC comes in. Using artificial intelligences and blockchain technology, OSA DC will give retailers the tools to neutralize understocking and overstocking in their stores. In addition, its business planning and enterprise solutions will allow manufacturers to work more closely with retailers to minimize supply chain disruptions, cut back on waste, and better understand purchasing trends.

At the end of all of this, the consumer will reap substantial benefits. With properly-managed inventory stocking, access to transparent product information, and OSA coin’s rewards/incentives system, consumers will have unprecedented purchasing power and more control over how and what they buy than ever before.

The Problem with the Retail Industry Today

On average, the global retail industry loses roughly $500bln in annual profits. $100bln of this comes from simple product waste and mismanagement (spoiled goods, shipping issues, etc.), while another $400bln comes from product shortages and understocking.

Stock-outs as they’re called create headaches for retailers and consumers. If consumers can’t find the product they’re looking for, they have to settle for unwanted alternatives or search for the item elsewhere, leaving retailers to lose potential sales, in some cases, a customer’s future business. Overstocking, on the other hand, leads to product waste, an unwelcome outcome for orders that could have been better spent on shipments for understocked goods.

These issues are exacerbated because retailers and their product distributors don’t have access to reliable, clean data on consumer trends and even product availability and other crucial information. To make matters worse, most of these organizations keep completely dissimilar data master catalogs, wherein a single product could be labelled differently across dozens of different databases.

With no standardized protocols, lack of reliable data, and ineffective business strategies propelled by outdated technology, retailers and manufacturers cannot effectively cooperate. Product tracking is a hassle, forecasting is in vein, and inventory planning is less than optimal. Without a contemporary solution to these problems, the brick-and-mortar retail industry serves to suffer with the advent of online retail services and shopping.

In an effort to offer quality AI-driven image recognition, OSA DC has also partnered with Neuromation, a synthetic data platform that is building a more efficient infrastructure to train AI models. Using image recognition and computer vision technology, Neuromation trains machine learning modules, labels data sets, and generates product data to help businesses better manage their AI backends. Its native currency, Neurotoken (NTK) will be used as a payment option on the network to compensate data providers, computation providers, and those who provide AI models and other data sets to the platform. OSA DC has partnered with Neuromation to utilize its image recognition software, a cutting edge technology that will enable OSA to properly train its AI to respond to on-shelf stockouts in real-time.

The OSA DC Solution

To eliminate these inefficiencies, OSA will keep its finger on the pulse of the entire supply chain ecosystem. It’s an all-in-one product tracker, shelf monitor, and data aggregator solution, one that will give retailers the necessary tools to better serve consumer needs.

The platform’s artificial intelligence will provide retailers and manufacturers with the data they need to mitigate product waste. OSA DC pools data from stores, warehouses, and consumers to let retailers know what products they should stock-up on and which products they have in excess. Using sensors for shelf monitoring, the AI will also keep track of in-store product movements in real-time, giving employees the ability to act on stock outs the moment they occur.

OSA provides a flexible data marketplace for any organization to use or contribute to its services. Its APIs allow retailers to pick and choose which features would best improve their services, and a variety of KPIs allow them to track improvements to their business model and give manufacturer’s proof of this progress. The data marketplace is not limited to these actors alone. Data providers, researchers, server farms, and others can offer resources and information to better enrich the platform and its data analytics, as well.

Alongside AI, the blockchain will provide a more efficient means of product tracking and inventory supervision. With OSA DC’s Data Master Catalog, all the organizations in its ecosystem will have access to standardized, authentic product information–no more juggling dozens of variegated names and labels for the same product. With the help of biosensors and other product quality management hardware, all parties involved with a product’s lifecycle will be able to keep tabs on its status as it makes its way from factory floor to a consumer’s shopping cart in store.

With AI providing clean, acute data for business strategies and the blockchain offering hyper-accurate inventory tracking, retail inefficiencies can be a thing of the past. This means stores will hold more of the products consumers actually want without wasting resources on the things they don’t.

And for the consumers, this doesn’t mean they’ll only have access to more reliable product availability. With OSA DC’s mobile app, they can cross check a good’s information and history, provide data on relevant products, and find the best deals for items across any of OSA DC’s participating stores. All the while, they’ll be rewarded in OSA coin for their contributions, which they can use for promotional products and other rewards on the platform.

OSA DC: Ushering in the Future of Retail

OSA DC is the next evolution of OSA Hybrid Solution, an AI platform that has already produced proven results for leading retailers and manufacturers across the globe. It has helped over 70 retailers and manufacturers across 40 countries increase their profit margins by 5.4%, including Danone, Mars, L’Oreal, Coca Cola, Pespico, JTI, Metro, and others.

The OSA DC team has decades of collective retail industry experience under their belt. Strategy and Vision Lead Maximilian Musselius is the Executive Director of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) Russia, an organization devoted to improving supply chain dynamics for the entire retail industry. Co-founder Alex Isaiev has over 17 years of experience in FMCG and duty free retail industries, serving roles from sales to management in over 57 countries.

Outside of the core team, OSA DC has partnered with a number of influential advisors. Don Swann, for instance, formerly served as VP of operations and COO of Walmart’s sectors in the US, Canada, Russia, and Brazil. Its business development advisor, Gary Fowler, has held executive positions at Simiens and HP, as well.

The project opened registration for its token sale’s whitelist on March 20, which will close after May 15. From May 27 to June 16, OSA will hold a public presale, which will feature an early bird bonus, while the main sale will start June 17 and run through July or until a hard cap of $40 million is reached. All tokens will be distributed to contributors 30 days after the sale ends. The ICO price for one OSA token (OSA) is 0.0002 ETH.

With a team of veterans and experienced executives at its helm, OSA DC is primed to improve on the success of OSA’s Hybrid Platform. If you’d like to learn more about the project and its token sale, you can visit OSA’s website here.