HOW CAN CPG COMPANIES MAKE IMAGE RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY WORTHWHILE?

By monitoring activities and progression with CPG solutions, companies can verify the implementation of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) needed for retail execution. When monitoring the level of sales of packaged goods, especially those aimed at end customers in the retail (store) distribution channel, Image Recognition Technology comes to the rescue.

In the absence of modern technology, a sales rep visits stores and manually collects quantitative data on products. This is a costly process and is time-consuming. Additionally, the average accuracy of the developed results is about 75%. When carrying out a visit, a sales rep must save the data in a spreadsheet or submit it to head office for data analysis.

The methodology described above is laborious, time-consuming and error-prone. When the data collected manually is analyzed, it does not reflect the real situation, but a historical one in relation to the current market situation.

StayinFront Digital offers CPG companies in the retail channel an Image Recognition solution through StayinFrontTouchCG. TouchCG allows sales reps to take pictures of products on the shelf in the stores where KPIs are to be executed. The photo taken is sent to neural networks which, by using artificial intelligence, analyzes the received image and on this basis recognizes the products visible on the shelf with an accuracy level of up to 96%+. The solution can then calculate the KPIs and the result is immediately available to both the sales rep and head office.

Using StayinFront Digital’s Image Recognition Solution allows you to track:

• • On-Shelf Availability
  • Share of Shelf (SoS)
  • Products at eye level
  • Promotional prices of products (price tags)
  • Promotional stands in stores
  • The layout of shelves in stores
  • Planogram vs. Realogram
  • Availability of tracking competitor’s products in the same categories

In addition, the solution can provide an optimized route of visits for store reps. This intelligent tool allows market, region and demographic refinement to maximize your field teams’ value and minimize their drive time with StayinFront.  A Dynamic Routing model will not only identify the store(s) to be ‘promoted’ in the plan, but it will also place the revised list of stores to be visited that day in an efficient route sequence.

CPG companies can benefit from using Image Recognition Technology to ensure an increase in the accuracy of the collected data and the speed of obtaining it, which translates into shorter time and lower costs of market research. The data will reflect the situation on the market in real-time. The software can easily be used standalone or alongside your existing SFA solution.

Contact your local StayinFront representative to find out more on how Image Recognition Technology can help grow your business. Want to find out more? Watch our on-demand webinar which digs deeper into how AI And Machine Learning can digitize retail shelves.