Krasnodar, Russia (July 8, 2024): Magnit, one of Russia’s leading retailers, set up a laboratory to test new solutions and improve in-store operations, based on 20 of its outlets. Such approach to piloting innovations will allow carrying out more experiments at a faster rate and speed up the scaling of successful hypotheses across the chain.

It was decided to establish the Laboratory of Retail Technologies on the basis of Convenience stores–the Company’s most popular format. The pool of stores was created with the account of such factors as turnover, location, redesign, etc. The outlets were selected in such a way as to ensure that the tested hypotheses are applicable to the entire network. As a result, the project scope includes 10 stores in Moscow and Voronezh each.

The hypotheses tested by Magnit within this project address HR management, assortment selection, management of inventories and shrinkages, as well as product display, pricing, and other processes impacting store turnover and performance. For example, the Company is now testing a new approach to assortment selection based on advanced artificial intelligence models that take into account detailed customer analysis, demographic factors, geo-analytics, location potential, etc. Other experiments include optimizing delivery frequency, adjusting the mechanism for goods auto-ordering, creating digital twins of stores to improve operational management, and much more. At the moment, the laboratory is exploring more than 25 hypotheses across the entire spectrum of daily stores operations. When selecting hypotheses, the laboratory’s specialists are guided by the needs of Magnit’s key business functions and work closely with colleagues from various departments, such as Commerce, IT, HR, etc.

Ekaterina Vinogradova, Director of the Laboratory of Retail Technologies at Magnit:

“Retail is changing rapidly at an ever-increasing rate. Therefore, it is now more important than ever to quickly and flexibly adapt to the external environment and customers, as well as to improve and to introduce modern business processes and technologies in stores. For this purpose, we have created the Laboratory of Retail Technologies on the basis of 20 of our stores. In these locations, we will be able to experiment, quickly run test cases, improve the experience of our customers, and roll out successful new approaches and solutions across the entire chain. Our objective is to make customers gravitate towards our stores. Together with all of Magnit’s functions, we test and propose effective solutions to streamline key business processes based on digital store models, big data, AI, and other advanced technologies.”

Magnit sets up Retail Tech Lab