MSI Surfaces Scales Corvus One® Across an 8-State Distribution Network
Daily autonomous drone flights replaced multi-week manual cycle counts at MSI Surfaces, lifting inventory accuracy from 80% to 99% and freeing 2 to 4 associates per facility to focus on picking and replenishment instead of audits.
MSI video transcript
Matthew Zucker, Team Lead - Operations, MSI Surfaces
We're a leading national distributor of dream surfaces. Flooring, wall tile, shower panels, you name it. We're all about making dream surfaces attainable and really bringing that heavy material into your homeowner's home. So before we had the drone, we had a team of two to four employees who would drive through the racks, look at every location and compare what's physically in the location to what we're expected to have in the system. And so that was really our primary process for finding missing material. So you had this situation where there was a real risk that we'd be missing material and not be able to fulfill a customer order. So that's a bad customer impact for us.
Meet Sanghvi, Business Process Analyst II, MSI Surfaces
The drones coming in, it bridged the gap and can now help me get more accurate systematic and physical information. That's reduced the amount of discrepancy that, at least we see in the data.
Alex Mikhalev, Robotics Software Engineer, Corvus Robotics
Not only can our drones find where things are, it can also find where things are not. Our vehicles can capture a volumetric understanding of the warehouse. They can see where things are. They can see how much of a slot is occupied and if something is empty, that is also reported.
Matthew Zucker, Team Lead - Operations, MSI Surfaces
We've also been able to use the drone data to help us look internally and say, "Well, how is it that material goes missing on us so often? What is it about our process? What is it about our system? What improvements can we make?" Probably 30 to 40 percent of the errors that we see, Corvus is able to tell us without any human intervention on our side, this is wrong and we're one-hundred percent sure it's wrong.
Thang Pham, Operations Director, MSI Surfaces
In other operations, if you are super busy, you might pull that inventory person to go fill orders. In this scenario, there is no pulling that person. The drone flies no matter what. So it's consistency that helps us here.
Meet Sanghvi, Business Process Analyst II, MSI Surfaces
The main reason we actually even considered going with Corvus was the fact that there was no infrastructure change involved. It was a very easy plug and play process.
Jackie Wu, CEO, Corvus Robotics
Our recent expansion installations of the Corvus inventory drone system to MSI sites have gone really quickly. It's only taken a few days. We're doing fully autonomous flights in the very first day. So we're able to provide this value extremely quickly due to the proprietary Corvus stack for autonomy, allowing us to fly without external infrastructure. Just with a landing pad. No stickers. No beacons. No human operator or anything like that. What this means for MSI is that they can get to ROI so much faster because we're finding all of that inventory the second week as opposed to six months down the line, which might be more typical for a warehouse automation project.
Reggy Soenarso, Senior VP - Operations, MSI Surfaces
Imagine when from three billion to five billion to ten billion eventually, the level of inventory and the number of transactions that we have to complete on a daily basis, it's going to triple or quadruple. We're confident that Corvus will be there to support us and support our growth along the way and we're excited for that.
Results from MSI's Orange, California facility
Overview
In a high-volume distribution business handling tens of thousands of slabs, tiles, and pallets across multi-acre warehouses, inventory accuracy directly impacts order fulfillment speed and customer service. When inventory teams rely on manual cycle counts, discrepancies often surface only during order picking, with cascading effects on delivery commitments and customer trust. MSI Surfaces needed a faster, more consistent way to validate reserve storage across its distribution network.
The Challenges
- Fulfillment Speed: Lost or misplaced inventory delayed customer deliveries, causing dissatisfaction, returns, and unmet service expectations across high-volume distribution operations.
- Inefficient Use of Labor: 2 to 4 warehouse associates per facility were dedicated to manual cycle counting and physical inventory audits, running multi-week passes through racks with annual wall-to-wall counts as the catchall.
- Operational Productivity: Labor was often pulled from fulfillment tasks to locate missing material, with inventory accuracy holding at roughly 80% between counts.
The Corvus Solution
MSI Surfaces deployed the Corvus One Autonomous Inventory Management System, beginning in Orange, California and scaling across its nationwide distribution network. Corvus One brings Physical AI to building-materials distribution, running in GPS-denied warehouse environments with onboard AI and computer vision. Drones autonomously fly aisles to validate reserve storage positions without operators, beacons, markers, or infrastructure modifications, with sites becoming operational on day one of installation.
Daily missions sync directly with MSI's WMS through the AIMS platform, producing a searchable, time-stamped visual record of every rack location scanned. Approximately 90 percent of identified discrepancies are auto-classified by type, letting the inventory team correct issues from a desk-side dashboard rather than walking the racks. The system also surfaces operational patterns behind misplacement, turning each discrepancy into a continuous-improvement signal rather than just a fix.
The Impact
- Inventory Accuracy Lifted from 80% to 99%: Continuous drone-led validation replaced manual quarterly and annual cycle counts, driving sustained accuracy from a typical 80% baseline to 99% across deployed facilities.
- Physical-Inventory Labor Eliminated: 2 to 4 employees per site previously dedicated to manual physical inventory now run no dedicated PI cycles. Labor reallocated to higher-value picking, replenishment, and operational improvement work, valued at approximately $110,000 annually per facility.
- Approximately $1.25M in Recovered Inventory: Faster discrepancy detection surfaces misplaced and "missing" inventory that would have been lost or written off during legacy quarterly counts, recovering meaningful dollar value year over year.
- 20x Faster Cycle Counting: Multi-week manual passes through racks compressed to autonomous daily flights, with full network coverage every 2 to 3 days.
- Weekly PI Frequency (Previously Annual): Physical inventory cadence shifted from an annual catchall to weekly autonomous validation at each facility, surfacing issues within days instead of months.
After its first successful deployment in Orange, California, MSI Surfaces expanded the Corvus One drone system across its nationwide distribution network, with active deployments across 8 states.
- California
- Washington
- Arizona
- Texas
- Illinois
- Georgia
- Florida
- New Jersey
We used to dedicate labor resources to do inventory audits. Now we have drones, which saves us a ton of time and allows us to reallocate our resources to more value-adding tasks like picking or replenishment.
Manufacturing Engineering — February 2025
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