The Challenge

A local supermarket operator was facing an increasingly common problem: maintaining consistently clean floors while dealing with rising labour costs and difficulty sourcing staff.

Their key challenges and impacts included:

• Staff availability: Increasing difficulty finding people for repetitive floor-cleaning shifts
• After-hours cleaning: Evening and weekend penalty rates added significantly to cleaning costs
• Cleaning consistency: Floor quality varied depending on staff availability and workload
• Staff productivity: Employees were spending valuable time cleaning floors instead of serving customers and completing higher-value duties
• Store presentation: The owner was concerned that the general appearance of the floors did not reflect the standard expected of the stores

The Inland Robotics Trial

Rather than asking the owner to make a decision based on specifications and demonstrations, Inland Robotics arranged a two-week trial of a commercial robotic floor cleaner in the supermarket.

The objective was simple: prove how the robot would perform in the supermarket's actual operating environment.

During the trial, the owner was able to assess:

• quality and consistency of floor cleaning
• autonomous operation in the supermarket environment
• reduction in repetitive manual floor cleaning
• potential to reduce dependence on after-hours and weekend labour
• ability for existing staff to focus on customers, presentation and other productive tasks
• overall improvement in the appearance of the store's floors.

The Result

The trial changed the conversation from "Could robotics work in our supermarket?" to "How do we roll this out across our other stores?"

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