About
Alert Innovation is a leader in e-Grocery technology based on its breakthrough Alphabot® platform. More than a superior micro-fulfillment center technology, the Alphabot® platform provides a means for grocers to profitably support online ordering today while building toward a new, automated-service supermarket format called Novastore™ that will usher in the next paradigm in food retailing.
Headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts, Alert Innovation has more than 50 issued or pending patents on its groundbreaking goods-to-person Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) and related technology. The Alert Innovation team of over 400 employees includes world-class automation engineering talent and an experienced leadership team that has built a highly collaborative, high-performance culture.
Alert Innovation’s recent awards include:
Alert Innovation is a proud member or supports the following organizations:
Our Story
The history of Alert Innovation can be traced back to a thought experiment in 1994, when inventor John Lert began thinking about how to use technology to create the “perfect” supermarket. He imagined a store in which machines pick customers’ orders for center-store items, but customers still pick their own fresh goods, with no checkout line.
That vision became the driving force for him professionally and led him into the field of material handling automation. In 2007, Lert founded CasePick Systems (now Symbotic®) to commercialize his invention of a mobile-robotic technology to automate case-picking in retail distribution centers. Lert sold Symbotic in 2009 and left the company in 2011 to begin working on an automated each-picking technology that would fulfill his vision of the automated supermarket.
In 2013, Lert founded Alert Corporation, later renamed to Alert Innovation, Inc., and began working with co-inventor and business partner Bill Fosnight. Together, they invented Alphabot®, secured start-up funding in 2016, and built the team that has made their vision of Alphabot a reality.
Culture
Our culture is guided by our mission and rooted in our core values. Our mission is to improve people’s lives through innovation – starting with retail – by transforming how people shop and how retailers operate.
Alert Innovation has four core values:
The Golden Rule
Extraordinarily powerful in its simplicity and depth: “Treat others as you would want to be treated.” It demands both empathy and fairness, qualities which are fundamental to harmonious human relationships and form the bedrock of ethical behavior.
The Power of Person
The contribution of every single person in a company is important, and the performance of the entire company can only be maximized when every person strives to achieve his/her full potential and to contribute to the best of his/her ability.
The Power of Team
The Power of Person becomes amplified exponentially when a group of people working effectively as a team create “performance synergy,” whereby the performance capacity of the team is much greater than the sum of the individual members’.
The Power of Truth, Humility and Accountability
We strive to see the world as it is, not as we want or imagine it to be, because only then can we make it better. This core value manifests itself through questioning, probing, testing, measuring, validating, verifying, proving, listening with an open mind, and making fact-based decisions. We move forward with a guiding principle of humility. Within the truth, we hold ourselves accountable to each other and the commitments we make both individually and collectively.
Leadership Team
The Alert Way
At its core, the Alert Way is “the power of teams to exceed customer expectations.” We started with industry best practices from Agile and Product Development disciplines and continuously improve them to make a nimble product delivery process that is transforming the food retail industry.
The Alert Way starts with a strong partnership among Engineering, Product Management, and Program Management professionals who interface with customers to understand their needs and define a product roadmap to meet their requirements. The roadmap is translated into customer value via scrum methodologies and ceremonies for all disciplines. Alert’s timeboxes are two or three weeks in duration; the team defines the work to be completed in each sprint.
Our product is deployed by a multi-faceted Operations team that starts its efforts early in the product development process to ensure that Engineering designs a manufacturable product. The Quality and Service team work closely with users to ensure a robust and positive user experience while providing the development teams with invaluable real-world insights into how the product performs.
Alert Innovation scales to the size necessary to meet customer promises and is committed to providing resources to ensure short-cuts are not required and product quality is never sacrificed through the entire product lifecycle.
If you like working in teams and being part of a high-performing organization aligned to meet clear goals, you will like being on the Alert Innovation team.