Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits LLC has been modernizing its supply chain. The Miami-based company today said it has partnered with Corvus Robotics Inc. to deploy the Corvus One autonomous inventory management system in nine distribution centers nationwide, with more planned.
“Southern Glazer’s operates at a scale where small improvements in accuracy have meaningful downstream impact,” stated Jackie Wu, CEO of Corvus Robotics. “Their team has embraced autonomous inventory as core infrastructure within their supply chain transformation initiative. Scaling to nine facilities with more than 40 drones demonstrates strong operational buy-in and sets a new benchmark for how beverage distributors can modernize inventory control without slowing the floor.”
Founded in 2017, Corvus Robotics claimed that its system is the first one built on an AI world model. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said its autonomous drones provide accurate inventory management for warehouses and production plants.
Corvus asserted that its robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model allows customers such as GNC, Dermalogica, and Staci Americas to quickly respond to changes in demand, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience.
Corvus One improves inventory accuracy
Corvus One operates continuously within active warehouse environments, flying through aisles to scan and validate reserve storage locations without disrupting case-picking operations. Corvus said the autonomous inventory audits sync directly with Southern Glazer’s WMS, freeing its team to focus on higher-value tasks.
At Southern Glazer’s, the Corvus system has completed about 5,000 flights and identified more than 35,000 verified discrepancies so far. The family-owned alcoholic beverage distributor, which has a total of 15 million sq. ft. (1.3 million sq. m) of warehouse space, reported the following benefits:
Operational throughput: Improved inventory accuracy has contributed to a 100 basis point improvement in cases per hour, enabling faster and more efficient fulfillment of customer orders.
Sixfold inventory validation increase: Shifting from a quarterly count cadence to biweekly turns across facilities, Southern Glazer’s said it has realized higher-frequency visibility that allows teams to identify and resolve discrepancies before they affect picking and outbound shipping.
More efficient use of labor: Approximately 60 to 70 labor hours per week per site have been reallocated from manual cycle counting to higher-value operational priorities. Inventory teams focus on resolving verified discrepancies rather than performing broad manual counts, using the Corvus interface to review high-resolution images, label scans, and historical video logs tied to specific storage locations.
“Across our network, inventory accuracy directly impacts how effectively we serve our customers,” said Karli Sage, vice president for supply chain management, technology, and engineering at Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits.
“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,” she added. “The speed at which we have scaled this technology across nine sites reflects the value it is delivering to our operations.”
Southern Glazer’s to provide ongoing feedback
Corvus One’s visual record of each scan provides searchable, time-stamped footage of pallet positions and license plate number (LPN) barcode labels, enabling rapid root-cause analysis and coaching, explained Corvus Robotics.
Verified discrepancies can include misplaced pallets, missing LPNs, or incorrect placements. In beverage distribution, those errors can represent significant dollar value per pallet, said the company.
The strategic collaboration includes regular cross-site operational reviews. Southern Glazer’s facilities will share best practices and continuously refine how autonomous inventory is integrated into their daily workflows. As additional facilities come online, the companies said they will continue to standardize deployment models and performance benchmarks across the network.
For food and beverage distributors managing high SKU counts, fast-moving case-picking environments, and tight service level expectations, frequent and autonomous reserve validation can detect discrepancies earlier, Corvus said. It can also provide stronger fill performance and measurable improvements in warehouse throughput, according to the company.