Meijer, one of the country’s largest supercenter chains, provides high quality groceries and merchandise to several states across the Midwest United States. Meijer has over 240 stores, 77,000 team members and is continuously improving today’s shopping experience with cutting-edge technology like curbside pickup and online grocery ordering.

Third-party shopping services enable customers to order groceries online. A professional shopper then does the shopping for them and delivers the groceries directly to the customer’s home.

The satisfaction of both the customer and the professional shopper is directly related to the speed of the overall delivery. If the professional shopper does not know the layout of a store, or chooses a non-optimal path, the order picking duration will increase.

Our Creating Picking and Fulfillment Efficiency system calculates the optimal path through Meijer supercenters to increase the efficiency of professional shoppers. Faster delivery leaves the customer satisfied, and allows the professional shopper to fulfill more orders, thereby increasing their profits.

Customers place orders online, which are then accepted by professional shoppers. The shoppers fulfill these orders by picking up the items a customer has ordered. Our application, running on Android and iOS devices, uses a sophisticated pathfinding algorithm to determine the optimal route to each item on the shopping list.

Our pathfinding algorithm is generalizable and can be used in any Meijer store. Also, our algorithm takes into consideration factors such as frozen and perishable items that need to be picked up at the end of the shopping trip.

The Android and iOS apps are written in C# and XAML using cross-platform interfaces created with Xamarin.Forms. These apps make requests to a SQL server database hosted in a Microsoft Azure Cloud environment via a .NET Framework API.