Walk into the back of any grocery store and you’ll find a network of equipment running quietly in the background. Freezer units, refrigeration systems, compressors. Most of the time nobody thinks about them. They just run. But when something goes wrong, even for a short window, the consequences can be significant. Product loss, food safety exposure, and the scramble to figure out what happened and when.
The problem isn’t usually the equipment failing. It’s the gap between the failure and the moment someone finds out about it.
THE FOUNDATION
Opto 22 is an industrial automation and monitoring platform used across a range of operational environments, including retail grocery. It connects to physical equipment and monitors for conditions that fall outside of normal parameters, things like freezer doors left open, temperature thresholds being crossed, or equipment running outside of expected ranges. When something triggers, Opto 22 knows about it.
For operations teams and facilities managers, it’s a reliable source of equipment intelligence. The challenge has always been getting that intelligence to the right people fast enough to act on it.
THE CONNECTION
This is where the ONE Platform® changes the equation. Through the ONE Platform® Web API, Opto 22 events are passed directly into the ONE Platform®, where they’re converted into actionable alerts and routed to the people who need to respond.
In a retail grocery environment, that means when a freezer door is detected as stuck open, the ONE Platform® immediately broadcasts an alert over store radios. The frontline employees who are closest to the situation hear about it in real time, not after a manager notices something is off during a walk, and not after someone spots a temperature reading on a back-office screen.
The integration is clean and direct. Opto 22 detects the condition. The ONE Platform® takes that signal and moves it through a configured event flow to reach the right people through the right channels.
THE IMPACT
The most immediate benefit is response time. Equipment issues that previously might have gone unnoticed for an extended period are now surfaced to floor-level staff the moment they occur. A freezer door that would have stayed open for an hour becomes a two-minute fix because the right person heard about it over their radio before they even had a chance to walk past it.
Beyond the immediate response, there’s a real cost avoidance story here. Product shrink from temperature-related issues is one of the more preventable sources of loss in grocery retail. When the gap between an equipment event and a human response shrinks, the exposure to that kind of loss shrinks with it.
There’s also a documentation benefit that tends to get overlooked. Every event that passes through the ONE Platform® is logged, which means facilities teams have a record of when equipment issues occurred, how frequently, and how quickly staff responded. That kind of data supports maintenance planning and makes conversations about equipment lifecycle much more grounded.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR OPERATION
Opto 22 already gives operations teams visibility into their equipment. The ONE Platform® takes that visibility and turns it into action by connecting it to the people on the floor. For any retail environment where equipment performance has a direct impact on product quality and customer experience, that connection is worth paying attention to.