Retail brands across the USA and Canada can access, collect and evaluate building data and information from all of their stores in one place thanks to a collaboration between Californian companies Matterport and Apex.

Matterport is a spatial data company driving the digital transformation of the built world. Apex provides store surveys. The joint offering, ApexView powered by Matterport, should help retail enterprises manage their stores more efficiently and accelerate decision-making so they can go to market faster.

“Brands with a large number of locations have struggled for decades from a lack of information about stores, making it difficult for everyone to make quick business decisions, from field-based employees to the CEO,” said Dan Cardona, chief operating officer of Apex. “Together with Matterport, we want to empower all business units to access digital twins of their retail stores, and find the information they need on that space in minutes so they can move projects forward faster. In doing so, customers will be able to cut thousands of hours in data collection, save hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel and labour costs, and increase speed to market and RoI across initiatives.”

Leveraging Matterport’s spatial data, Apex enables its clients, which include Starbucks, Home Depot, 7-Eleven, Fresh Market and Chipotle, to extract value by digitising their entire store portfolios ranging from 25 to 25,000 locations.

ApexView provides enterprises with a customised online dashboard and AI-enabled search engine that help them better understand store survey data captured by a data capture team. This process creates detailed digital twins that include both the high-fidelity visual appearance and dimensional information of each store, giving retailers intelligence of their building assets at any point in time and from any device.

It also leverages Matterport’s deep spatial indexing capabilities, which turns the built world into data. Retail and restaurant brands can do a full audit of a space, essentially turning imagery into structured data for usage purposes. Through object recognition, building characteristics will become searchable for better facilities management across a fleet of locations.

For instance, fixtures such as flooring, lighting and shelves can be counted digitally and automatically, rather than having to send team members to count these physically in each store. Retail facility teams can also quickly locate equipment imagery and serial numbers for efficient repair. This saves time and cost by surfacing information about any object in any location, as well as enabling more effective facilities management.

With space auditing, retailers can also perform automatic metadata collection and workflow orchestration, and query and analyse spaces at scale to derive business insights from every space in their multi-store portfolio.

Retailers can more effectively collaborate with vendors and partners in design, facilities, operations and estates to move projects forward faster, enable global facilities management teams to conduct virtual site visits, and automate store audits at scale. In partnering with Apex, Matterport is furthering its mission of digitising and indexing the built world so users can have more ways of searching, exploring and focusing on usable data in a space.

“With Apex, we’ve brought a powerful solution to market that helps restaurants and retailers know anything about any store at any time, all in one place,” said Jay Remley, chief revenue officer of Matterport. “No longer do they have to send employees to stores to manage facilities, collaborate on merchandising strategy, or conduct safety inspections. Now, retail brands can have a complete virtual understanding of everything in their stores so that they can cut costs, plan more efficiently and make faster decisions. This partnership is a game-changer for the retail and restaurant industry.”