En-tienda: Simulate Your Success

Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) comprise a large proportion of the South and Latin American grocery retail industry, providing 67% of the region’s employment but only 1/3 of the GDP. This is disproportionately lower than small businesses in other parts of the world. Additionally, 77% of these businesses fail within only 4 years. Z-Tech’s goal is to develop innovative solutions to help the large numbers of South and Latin American SMBs in the grocery retail sector become reliably more successful.

Our approach for the Winter quarter was to help expand SMBs beyond brick-and-mortar stores through Provisions, a mini convenience store embedded in local taxis. Provisions includes a self-service vending cabinet stocked with convenience items, a passenger interface that allows for customer transactions, a roof-top camera that uses computer vision to capture the seat’s current inventory and inform the driver when it’s time to restock, locks that keep the items secure until time of purchase selection, and a driver interface that allows the driver to see the current seat inventory as well as connect with the SMB network when it’s time to restock.

Our final solution was En-tienda, an online education platform that simulates the dynamic, day-to-day experience of grocery retail SMB ownership. En-tienda is aimed at prospective SMB owners, to learn best practices before investing in their own brick-and-mortar store. En-tienda was developed in Unity and contains the following key features. The virtual environment enables risk and capital-investment free learning at an accelerated timescale conducive to the working adult. Key features of En-tienda include customizable store environments representative of SMBs in the region, dynamic simulation flow to capture the multi-tasking needs of SMB ownership, immersive tasks conducive to hands-on learning, tailored feedback correlating simulation performance to SMB profitability and long-term health, and embedded learning video tutorials to motivate business management knowledge.