Southern Glazer's Scales Corvus One™ Across 9 Distribution Centers
Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits scaled to more than 40 autonomous inventory drones across nine U.S. distribution centers in under 18 months, replacing quarterly manual counts with continuous, biweekly reserve storage validation.
Overview
In beverage alcohol distribution, inventory accuracy directly impacts customer fill rates, throughput, and downstream service performance. Manual quarterly counts created month-long blind spots in reserve storage, with discrepancies surfacing during picking and shipping instead of before. Southern Glazer’s needed continuous validation that ran without disrupting case-picking operations.
The Challenges
- Quarterly Count Cadence: Reserve storage was validated by hand on a quarterly cadence, leaving month-long blind spots between counts and limiting how quickly the inventory team could react to misplaced or missing pallets.
- Discrepancies Found Downstream: Missing and misplaced inventory often surfaced during picking or shipping rather than before, putting customer fill rates and out-of-stock metrics at risk across high-volume case-picking operations.
- Labor Burn on Manual Counts: Inventory teams spent significant weekly hours hunting for product instead of resolving root causes, with cycle counting pulling labor away from higher-value operational priorities.
- Limited Network Visibility: Without continuous validation, the team had no consistent baseline for comparing inventory health across sites or identifying patterns before they impacted outbound performance.
The Corvus Solution
Southern Glazer’s deployed the Corvus One™ Autonomous Inventory Management System across nine distribution centers nationwide, scaling to more than 40 autonomous drones in under 18 months. Corvus One brings Physical AI to beverage distribution, running in GPS-denied warehouse environments with onboard AI and computer vision. Drones autonomously fly aisles to scan and validate reserve storage locations without operators, infrastructure modifications, or floor disruption, integrating directly into Southern Glazer’s active case-picking workflows.
Daily missions sync directly with Southern Glazer’s Manhattan Associates WMS through the AIMS platform, producing a searchable, time-stamped visual record of every pallet position scanned. When discrepancies are identified, inventory teams use the Corvus interface to review high-resolution images, label scans, and historical video logs tied to specific storage locations, moving root-cause analysis off the spreadsheet and onto the evidence.
The Impact
- 6x Inventory Visibility: Reserve storage validation shifted from a quarterly cadence to biweekly turns across facilities, significantly increasing visibility and shrinking the window between count and corrective action.
- 100 Basis Point Throughput Lift: Improved inventory accuracy has contributed to a 100 basis point improvement in cases per hour, enabling faster and more efficient order fulfillment across the network.
- 60 to 70 Labor Hours Reallocated: Per site, per week, hours previously spent on manual cycle counting now go to higher-value operational priorities and resolving verified discrepancies.
- Proactive Issue Detection: Higher-frequency visibility surfaces discrepancies before they affect picking and outbound shipping, protecting customer fill rates and service levels.
- Network-Wide Visibility: Across nine facilities, the system delivers continuous insight into inventory conditions, creating a consistent operational baseline across the distribution network.
Across our network, inventory accuracy directly impacts how effectively we serve our customers. 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. The speed at which we have scaled this technology across nine sites reflects the value it is delivering to our operations.
What Autonomous Inventory Drones Unlock for Beverage Distribution
For beverage distributors operating high-volume, case-picking environments, inventory accuracy is directly tied to fulfillment performance and customer service levels. What Southern Glazer’s deployment unlocks at network scale:
- Continuous reserve storage validation across multiple facilities without adding labor
- Discrepancies caught before they reach picking and outbound shipping
- Operations continue uninterrupted during scans, no infrastructure modifications, no floor downtime
- Inventory teams move from reactive counting to proactive root-cause work
- Network-wide visibility creates a single performance baseline across the distribution network
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