Southern Glazer’s to Optimize Inventory With Autonomous Robot Deployment
Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits will deploy an autonomous inventory management system across its supply chain.
This reflects an extended partnership with Corvus Robotics. Southern Glazer's has already been operating more than 40 Corvus One drones across nine distribution centers in the U.S.
The Corvus One system operates independently within warehouse settings, navigating aisles to scan and verify reserved storage locations without interfering with case-picking activities. This enables hands-free inventory audits that update directly into Southern Glazer’s WMS, allowing team members to focus on other tasks.
The system scans for discrepancies on a bi-weekly basis rather than quarterly, providing better visibility and allowing the team to identify issues early, before they affect picking or outbound shipping.
The system also provides a searchable record of scans, timestamped with pallet positions and license plate labels, allowing the team to perform root cause analysis and coaching.
Over the past 18 months of the implementation, it has led to improved inventory accuracy, fill rates and operational throughput. The system has completed 5,000 flights and detected over 35,000 verified discrepancies — such as misplaced pallets, missing LPNs or incorrect placements — which can help prevent significant financial losses.
Southern Glazer’s has also seen a 100-basis-point rise in cases per hour, leading to quicker order processing. They have also redirected 60 to 70 labor hours per site each week from manual cycle counting to focus on higher operational priorities.
As a result of its success, Southern Glazer's will scale the technology. As more facilities come online, the two companies plan to further standardize deployment models and performance benchmarks across the network.
“By increasing the frequency and precision of our reserve inventory validation, we are identifying issues earlier, improving fill rates and enabling our teams to focus on proactive problem-solving instead of reactive counting,” Karli Sage, vice president, supply chain management, technology and engineering with Southern Glazer’s, said in a statement. “The speed at which we have scaled this technology across nine sites reflects the value it is delivering to our operations.”
