In the competitive retail market, every detail counts. Customers are quick to switch from their preferred seller when they cannot buy what they want at the chosen time and location. This usually means lost sales, strained customer relationships, and a damaged reputation. On the other hand, maintaining excessive stock in stores or warehouses ties up capital and often leads to additional costs. That’s why retailers focus on optimizing their inventory, as Kamil Folkert, CEO of Occubee, explains in an interview with Forbes.pl. Occubee provides a SaaS platform that optimizes store and warehouse inventory based on AI-driven sales forecasts.
FORBES: THE RETAIL MARKET IS HIGHLY COMPETITIVE – BOTH FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF RETAILERS AND PRODUCERS. HOW DOES OCCUBEE HELP THEM CREATE A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CONDITIONS?
Kamil Folkert: The complexity of business ecosystems is constantly increasing. To stay ahead of the competition, businesses must act proactively, not reactively or post factum. This requires relying on data and the forecasts derived from it. Continuous business optimization is equally important, which demands the use of sophisticated decision-support methods because there are more decisions to be made, at more detailed levels, and in shorter timeframes. Without automation, this is impossible. And this is where Occubee helps gain a competitive edge. The processes defined in Occubee are based on AI-driven forecasts, which enables proactive actions instead of reactive ones. For example, the system recommends sending specific products in optimal quantities to particular stores. This helps avoid out-of-stock situations before the store’s minimum inventory level is even reached, let alone the product being sold out. This way, businesses can prevent lost sales and maintain an optimal stock level in stores.
HOW DOES OCCUBEE’S MISSION “WE EMPOWER COMPANIES TO REDEFINE POSSIBILITIES THROUGH DATA” TRANSLATE INTO YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION FOR CLIENTS?
We wanted this statement to highlight our belief that data enables better business decisions, which in turn helps improve the foundation of a business. One of our clients aptly compared this approach to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If the basic business needs, such as increasing sales, reducing costs and allocated capital, improving profitability, enhancing efficiency, and customer satisfaction, are met, the company gains a solid foundation. Only then can higher-level needs, such as environmental and social responsibility, be addressed. Organizations with strong foundations also have a positive impact on economic growth and perform well in highly competitive environments. Redefining possibilities, as we mention in our mission, is about addressing those higher-level needs, which can be understood in various ways. We provide the ability to build, based on advanced data analysis, the foundation that supports this direction of action.
HOW DOES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, USED BY OCCUBEE, SERVE STRATEGIC DECISIONS IN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, INCLUDING SALES FORECASTING, AND THE MANAGEMENT OF STORE AND WAREHOUSE INVENTORIES, AND WHAT DOES IT CHANGE IN THESE DECISIONS?
One cannot avoid mentioning the increasingly popular generative artificial intelligence, which we encounter almost everywhere, often in more intrusive forms. The AI used in Occubee does not generate questionable results based on copied content from the internet. These are machine learning algorithms, trained on historical data to enable sales and demand forecasting. By providing reliable information about the future, they serve as a starting point for algorithms that automate the process of inventory management in stores and warehouses, as well as supporting experts in making decisions, such as selecting the product range, shifting inventory based on changes in sales potential, or determining the timing and scale of price changes.
WHY DO DECISION-MAKERS IN RETAIL-RELATED BUSINESSES CHOOSE SUCH A CRUCIAL SOLUTION IN THE SAAS MODEL?
Retailers have been refining their business processes for years. Occubee offers a significant opportunity – it does not interfere with these processes in a way that would prevent their continued use or require them to be redefined. As a result, with Occubee, the same process can be executed based on better data. This is crucial. The SaaS model itself no longer surprises anyone as a standard for delivering software, offering specific benefits, such as reducing risks related to continuity of operations. SaaS solutions provide independent infrastructure that enables secure integration with the client’s systems and offers the advantages of dynamic scalability. This is especially important for data-driven processes and allows the configuration of the necessary computational resources in such a way that, for the client, the results in terms of generated forecasts, store demand calculations, and orders to warehouse are always delivered on time. This ensures that logistics processes can start and end at a specific time.
WHAT WOULD YOU ADVISE COMPANIES THAT WANT TO IMPLEMENT AI-BASED SOLUTIONS IN THEIR BUSINESS?
First of all, I encourage starting with the low-hanging fruit, the data that already exists within the organization. This data is of higher quality than external data and contains knowledge about repetitive processes that are worth optimizing. Secondly, we often don’t realize the possibility of using existing data to automate these processes. If we don’t have a central system for managing replenishment, we end up giving control over the business to individual regional directors or store managers. They then have to decide what they think might run out on the shelf tomorrow or the day after. This is a task by definition difficult because there are too many decisions to be made at a detailed level. In a medium-sized retail chain with dozens to hundreds of locations and an assortment of several thousand products, if we wanted to make decisions for each product in each store individually, we would have to make millions of decisions daily. This is impossible for a human but not a challenge for a system that can make these decisions fully automatically or allow an expert to approve selected results.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF BEING AN INDEPENDENT COMPANY, WHICH BECAME A FACT AFTER SEPARATING FROM THE 3SOFT GROUP?
Operationally, not much has changed because Occubee had already been functioning as an organized part of the enterprise for some time. After the spin-off, we certainly gained the ability to set our own pace of development. At the same time, we have gained a clear identity, which influences how we are perceived by potential investors and the market. Today, we are simply a company delivering the Occubee product in a SaaS model, rather than a software house building an innovative product alongside providing dedicated IT services.
AS YOU GROW OUT OF THE STARTUP PHASE, WHICH IS A DREAM FOR MANY INVESTORS, HOW DO YOU FINANCE YOUR DEVELOPMENT?
I have to start by saying that it would be more accurate to say that we are growing back into the startup ecosystem. To put it precisely, we are transitioning from a company with a 20-year history. My dream and ambition in my current role was to re-root the startup culture within our team. We are facing different challenges and a different level of uncertainty when it comes to validating business models, partnership models, target markets, and product-market fit. This requires a different way of thinking and a fresh approach. Alongside that, we are relying on our solid expertise in data management. We have more experience than a typical startup, and our tool is technologically advanced – it has to be in order to solve complex problems in the core processes of our clients. However, we make sure that the startup culture is with us every day.
We finance our growth in several ways. As shareholders of 3Soft, a few years ago we made the decision that the development of this business branch, which we have now spun off into a separate company, is strategically important. Initially, we invested the profits generated from it. Then we secured funding from EU funds. In 2022, we signed an investment agreement with Warsaw Equity Group and Cezary Smorszczewski, who invested 20 million PLN into our business.
WHAT ARE THE FOUNDERS’ FUTURE PLANS AND AMBITIONS FOR THE COMPANY?
I often hear CEOs answer similar questions by talking about target markets, the number of customers, or product development. I believe that our ambitions in these areas will be fulfilled if we become true partners to our clients in this journey, where data serves as the fuel for better decisions, and those decisions drive business growth. And this business, through its competitiveness, will give itself the opportunity to redefine possibilities and shape the answers to the challenges of the modern world.
The interview was published on Forbes.pl.
