Online Product Facing Recognition & Monitoring

After the implementation of Online Product Facing Recognition and Monitoring by effie, businesses can achieve the following KPIs:

Industry

Online Product Facing Recognition and Monitoring is one of the most useful technological processes offered by the effie service. CPG manufacturers, distributors, and retailers can benefit from its implementation in their business processes.

User Type

This use case can be relevant for supervisors, regional managers, store managers, sales representatives, merchandisers, and other responsible officials in their everyday activities. Speaking about the separate roles’ objectives that can be achieved due to the online product facing recognition and monitoring, it’s possible to zoom further in, for example:

• A merchandiser might need to check the facing of priority positions and monitor competitive SKUs
• A regional manager might need to monitor the actual execution of facing layouts and planograms across teams
• A store manager might need to get on-shelf availability data in real time to avoid out-of-stock situations

Pain Point

Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers face a challenge: expanding retail coverage and increasing product assortment typically require additional resources, especially field employees responsible for manually tracking product facings on shelves. However, numerous negative factors come into play here: field staff is expensive, while manual counting is time-consuming and error-prone, and negatively impacts productivity, accuracy, and sales. As a result, all these factors cause delays in identifying shelf availability gaps and often lead to missed sales opportunities, particularly during peak shopping periods.

For example, let’s consider the following symptom: a merchandiser fails to visit all stores during the day and check for enough facing of the specific SKU. The reason is the outdated manual calculation with pen and paper that requires too much time and effort. The consequence is that SKUs are underrepresented, and the company loses its position on the shelf compared with rivals and, consequently, loses its profits. However, an AI-based tool would eliminate the risks of inefficient manual labor.

Current Process

Let’s view an anonymous case of a company that strives to manage its daily processes at retail outlets without the effie solution. It’s not uncommon because, according to the statistics, 67.4% of supply chain managers use Excel spreadsheets as a management tool. However, currently, management without digital tools is inefficient. Our hypothetical company undertakes the outdated steps to recognize and monitor product facing in the following way:

Let’s view an anonymous case of a company that strives to manage its business processes without the effie solution. It’s not uncommon because, according to the statistics, 67.4% of supply chain managers use Excel spreadsheets as a management tool. However, currently, management without digital tools is inefficient. Our hypothetical company undertakes the outdated steps to recognize and monitor product facing in the following way:

1. The company managers prepare tasks to be performed by field staff (mainly on paper) →
2. Field employees visit stores (as many as they can, but not all required) and count product facings manually, slowly, and often with mistakes →
3. Field workers create their reports manually (that is, slowly and inefficiently) →
4. Managers receive manual reports with delays and filled with expired data →
5. And this vicious cycle repeats itself.

Needless to say, every step entails risks or losses, be it money, time, effort, or such intangible things as brand authority or customer satisfaction.

Effie Solution

To change the deplorable situation with product facing recognition and monitoring, the effie service implements real-time product recognition technology to automatically count product facings from shelf images captured by mobile employees. The advanced neural network provides accurate, real-time data sent directly to employees’ smartphones. This enables immediate corrective actions, significantly reducing data collection time and boosting productivity.

Numbers speak louder than words:

• In just 4 months of using effie, her client, ranked among the Top 5 beer manufacturers, increased retail coverage from 63% to 82%.
• In the first month of use, a snack food manufacturer reported that its merchandiser team discipline improved by 36%.
• Retail coverage of the snack food manufacturer increased by 50% because effie allowed more retail locations to be visited daily.
• The same snack food manufacturer revealed that data collection time was reduced by more than three times.

Data obtained in real time is aggregated into dashboards for strategic decision-making, eliminating human error and improving accuracy for the sake of effective management.

KPI

The natural question arises: “What quantitative indicators can be achieved after implementing online product facing recognition and monitoring?” The resultant effect can include the following:

1. Increase in product inventory accuracy: Percentage increase in inventory accuracy for product facings using image recognition technology (e.g., achieving up to 99% counting accuracy compared to manual methods).
2. Increase in retail coverage: An increase in the number of retail locations visited per day due to automation (e.g., the ability to check twice as many stores per day).
3. Improvement in employee productivity: An increase in field employees’ productivity due to automated inventory tracking (e.g., 30-40% more shelves checked per day).
4. Reduction in missed sales opportunities: Percentage decrease in lost sales due to out-of-stock items by identifying gaps in product availability more quickly (e.g., a 20% reduction in missed sales over a month).

All KPIs can be monitored in real time and measured easily with the help of the consolidated dashboard titled “KPI Performance”.

User Role

The use case of online product facing recognition and monitoring can involve sales representatives, sales managers, administrators, merchandisers, and other relevant roles. Please check out the table below showing some company roles, their tasks, and the effie system elements they can use to streamline their everyday routine:

Client Story

Let’s consider the numbers provided by effie’s clients in the wake of cooperation. One of the largest beverage manufacturers, Coca-Cola Beverages Ukraine, coped with its automation challenges due to effie’s AI-based platform. The function of online product facing recognition and monitoring, in particular, helped the company increase the number of retail locations checked daily by two times. You can read the full story of the cooperation between Coca-Cola Beverages Ukraine and effie in this article.

A famous Ukrainian beverage manufacturer, the First Private Brewery, also achieved high results due to the function of online recognition and monitoring. A month after the project started, the company’s coverage increased from 63% to 82%; in another 3 months, it exceeded 90%. The growth took place even though the merchandisers’ turnover rate in the market is so high that the team is always understaffed, never reaching 100%.

Another large Ukrainian manufacturer of snack products, Snack Production, obtained significant results, too. A month after the effie implementation, merchandiser discipline increased by 36%, and the correspondence of the assortment matrix in retail outlets increased by 8%. Moreover, sales growth in retail chains amounted to 11% due to a stockout decrease and an increase in facings and stock. Besides, the coverage area increased by 50%, while the time spent on data collection decreased by more than 3 times. You can read the full story of the cooperation between Snack Production and effie in this article.

Integration

If information needs to be exchanged with external business systems, the effie service can be integrated with SAP, Oracle NetSuite, or Salesforce CRM.