Carrefour Italy has integrated a new platform that unifies its forecasting and replenishment capabilities as the retailer seeks to reduce manual processes and boost automation across its stores.
Through a partnership with Reflex Solutions, the retailer has deployed the technology across its 1,200 stores including its proximity stores, supermarkets, hypermarkets, and seven logistics hubs.
The retailer said the unified platform enables the adoption of advanced planning methods, such as recipe-based forecasting, that will help Carrefour coordinate demand for ingredients and products while minimising waste.
The technology rollout aims to help the business reduce manual processes and enable more consistent planning and decision making, streamlining daily operations to provide greater visibility across the entire supply chain, with a particular focus on fresh products, where speed and accuracy are critical.
The retailer added the integration will help it progress towards excess stock reduction, an improvement on availability, and a better response to local demand for both food and non-food products.
The initiative is part of a wider strategy for the Carrefour Group to become a Digital Retail company by 2026.
The Group’s transformation plan is built around digital acceleration, data-centric operations, and intelligent supply chain management – which also includes developing more intelligent and digitised supply chain management.
The wider company is allocating €3 billion towards digital transformation between 2022 and 2026, with annual investments rising to €1.7 billion.
Carrefour Group currently has a multi-format network of more than 14,000 stores across 40 countries, with a total of 500,000 people working for the brand worldwide.
Alessandra Iacovelli, chief investment officer at Carrefour Italy said that the new forecasting technology aims to boost customer satisfaction across all sales channels.
“This tool also enables us to continue reducing our environmental impact, one of the four public benefit goals defined in our Benefit Corporation charter,” she added.
In August, Carrefour announced the rollout of generative AI assistant to 125,000 employees across eight countries.
At the time, the company’s group chief technology officer Olivier Gibert said that the conversational agent, which is powered by Google’s Gemini, will simplify daily work, free up operational time, and bring AI directly to teams on the ground.
