Kaufland’s International Auditing Department has developed an app with AI to make its freshness checks more efficient. The application helps the auditors of Schwarz Group’s subsidiary to check the internal processes of the stores in order to ensure customer satisfaction. The fact that specialist departments are developing solutions themselves using standard AI tools has the potential to shake up the world of retail technology.
Kaufland’s Director of Countries, Thorsten Sauter, reports on LinkedIn how his colleagues in International Audit are using their self-developed app to check the availability of goods in the bakery section more quickly. “The results are phenomenal: What used to take over an hour is now done in just 15 minutes,” says Thorsten Sauter, explaining the efficiency gains achieved by the app.
The application, which Kaufland already uses in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Croatia, was built by the auditors using Google’s Gemini and AppSheet, a no-code app development platform that now also belongs to Google. The data flows into Google Sheets in real time and is visualised directly in a Looker Studio dashboard. This allows Kaufland to perform immediate, cross-country analysis, reports Thorsten Sauter.
Programming without developers
The ability to develop applications for process optimisation using AI without significant IT knowledge could massively change the world of retail technology. Currently, around 4,500 employees work at the Heilbronn, Minden and Berlin locations for Schwarz IT alone – not counting their colleagues at Schwarz Digits. Hundreds of IT service providers are under contract as business partners at Schwarz Procurement.
