Brain Corp announces a new user interface and reporting features that improve ease of use and usability for their clients. The new features are especially useful for large scale deployments like the recent announcement of a fleet of BrainOS-enabled Tennant T380AMR Floor Scrubbers at Schnucks grocery stores.
Enhancements To Reports
The new features are targeted at deployments where a variety of user types will interact with this system. In the case of Schnucks grocery stores, this might include users such as the stock clerk, the in-house store manager or the regional manager. For floor scrubbers, such as the machines by Tennant, enhancements include measuring the cleaning efficiency of the system, along with generating reports from daily and weekly operations.
“These new robotic scrubbers will enhance cleaning performance, while giving valuable time back to teammates so they can spend more time doing what is most important: serving our customers,” said Kim Anderson, Senior Director Store Operations Support at Schnucks. “Robotics and technology are important tools for helping us improve in-store experiences and achieve our customer-first values.”
The latest BrainOS reporting and data features (image courtesy of Brain Corp)
The new software release includes the following features and functionality that elevate the use and adoption of robotics for businesses and their employees:
- Universal design and iconography — A new “glanceable” user interface (UI) featuring international symbols makes it easy for robot operators to understand what to do almost immediately regardless of language.
- Powerful route-cleaning upgrades — New features for BrainOS-powered robotic scrubbers give robot operators maximum flexibility in cleaning their commercial locations. “Multiple consecutive routes” allows for up to six different routes to be scheduled and executed. “Route repeat” allows for a continuous loop of one or more routes to clean problem areas.
- Unified reporting across applications — An industry-first capability that enables executives to get performance metrics of multiple BrainOS-powered robotic applications via a single interface. Users can easily toggle back and forth between the different robotic applications to see core usage metrics, enabling them to quickly understand the overall impact of their robotics program on their operations.
- Report internationalization — BrainOS reporting interfaces now come in a dozen different languages, with more on the way, to help global businesses better manage their robotic fleets in multiple countries. This internationalization includes product-specific languages, as well as time formats and units of measurement.
- New reporting at scale — Thanks to a new centralized data warehouse and a high-performance reporting infrastructure, users of BrainOS robots can now look at activity reports and autonomous usage metrics for one robot in one store or thousands of robots across the globe within seconds. This enables executives to understand usage and compliance of their operations in near real-time.
Through its global manufacturing partners, Brain Corp currently operates more than 14,000 AMRs worldwide—the largest fleet of its kind operating in high-traffic commercial indoor locations. The company’s robotic applications include floor scrubbers, vacuums, delivery tugs, and a new shelf analytics application that is currently being piloted in major retail locations.
Our Analysis
Brain Corp’s strategy of providing a software and controls platform that quickly and easily adapts to any AMR-based application is not unique to the market. There are several other robot operating systems and controls competitors who are also attacking this market need. However, Brain Corp has made some good product decisions along the way, especially the choice to work with existing, mature vehicle providers who have the channel strength and manufacturing prowess to build, deploy and support the automated machines. This strategy has enabled Brain Corp to focus primarily on enriching their software and controls platform while leaving the vehicle manufacturers to focus on their strengths. Two of Brain Corps biggest partners in the floor cleaning market are Tennant and Nilfisk.
Brain Corp has solutions for a variety of applications segments, however, floor cleaning is currently their biggest market. Working with grocery and retail vendors in this segment has enabled Brain Corp to learn from the customer needs and quickly iterate to deliver features that customers need. As demonstrated by this recent software release, Brain Corp is focusing on providing customers with value in the form of rich reporting and improvements to the user interface for the machines. This is functionality that users at every lever will interact with everyday.
