U.K.-based online grocer Ocado Group PLC carries 50,000 SKUs. It has more than 645,000 customers and processes 280,000 orders per week. Its average order value is nearly $140. That’s a lot of bread, milk and butter.

Such a vast base of sales, orders and customers means that even the smallest efficiency-oriented tweaks can have a great influence on Ocado’s bottom line, says Greg Cempla, general manager of Ocado Technology, a unit of Ocado that develops robotics, machine learning, simulation, data science, forecasting and routing systems.

“It’s the economy of scale,” Cempla says. “A tiny savings on the cost of processing an order can have a significant impact on your bottom line when you have hundreds of millions in sales. We are always looking for the biggest bang…

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