Set the Hack Free #3 : AutOcado
I've always wanted one of those intelligent fridges (see: the Register (1998) or the Guardian ) that reorders food for me. But there are a few problems with this,
As Jack Schofield points out in the Guardian there is no way I'm going to scan barcodes. Putting away the shopping is already enough hassle for me.
I don't want some fancy new RFID fridge, If I'm going to spend the money on RFID kit I can do cooler things with it and as soon as I'd have a fancy RFID fridge I'd need fancy RFID cupboards as well.
However I figured out a cheaper approach while ordering from Ocado recently – quite simply do some basic analysis of the time between when you last ordered an item and the next time you order it and also the quanity in the first order.
All you need to do is get the computer to watch you or rather your e-mail receipts from Ocado, assume that over time you aren't going to horde or go without toilet roll for a few months. In fact a 0 stock level in your home isn't that important, if the computer watches you, it will reorder at the point that you should be getting concerned about your supplies based on your previous ordering history rather than at 0 stock, as after all you wouldn't wait to order at 0 stock yourself.
Now, I don't think you want to do this for everything you order from your online supermarket, its really for "store cupboard items". So you need to make a list of what you want to manage this way.
However brands change, etc. So how do you determine from some plain text like the email Ocado sends you with the list of things you've ordered whats toilet roll and whats washing up liquid that are on your list? Well you simply do a google search for the product name, e.g. "puppy dog soft tissues" and "toilet roll", in fact you do all permutations and then count the number of hits (long term caching would be nice here) - the one that comes back with the most hits for the pair of terms is probably the correct association (some degree of calibration/threshold is probably required).
Of course multipacks make things difficult - the best I can think of to solve this is to use price as an indicator of unit. So "super coke 24" if it costs 4.80 and if "super coke mega 48" costs 9.00 you can establish some basic relationship. with the later being just under 2x the base unit of the first.
Anyway, once you have the cleaned data, say ...
week 2 order toilet roll 4 units
week 4 order toilet roll 8 units
You know that you will have to reorder toilet roll in around week 8 (((wk 4 - wk 2) * (8 units / 4 units)) + wk 4).
Of course firing up the report in say week 7 will mean you also have to do a little bit more math to take into account.
You will also have to track how often you normally place an order so you know when the target date should be for your stock levels.
One last point is that you don't want to order blindly, you do want to adjust the suggested order because when you do this the computer gets more human generated data to refine its model from. Oh, and I'm not even going to consider seasonal adjustments on things like bottled water.
Anyway I doubt I'll be implementing this soon, but if someone even more obsessive about this sort of thing than me does so, I'd like to hear about it.
As a side note, years ago I worked for a retail logistics company called Radius Retail in Edinburgh - Two cocenpts I'll always remember from this experience were ...
- The way via OO that large supermarkets were treated like warehouses (they could effectively be a warehouse for the smaller "metro" sized stores).
- The sheer amount of logic/analysis that goes into retail/warehousing.
So it's with the second point in mind that I'm guessing that there are probably companies already doing this sort of trend analysis, but instead of your fridge they are predicting stock levels of different stores/warehouses along the food chain.
Actually – WARNING MADNESS AHEAD! – i know of some groups of friends who live very close together but in different houses. So if they wanted, they could apply the first point as well. They could have a distributed warehousing concept between the group in order to smooth trends/increase likelihood of availability. I did warn you of the madness.
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Posted by: fipnjl swpadg | 2008.04.27 at 09:01 AM