With multiple app-based shopping options, it may seem that physical retail is a thing of the past. The available data puts physical retail as the first choice of customers when it comes to purchasing. The shelf space and the area available for sales is a challenge in retail. The advertisers constantly look for appropriate shelf space to stack their product. Hence, the inventory management is paramount in establishing the success and profits in retail. To aid this, continuous auditing of the presence / absence of a brand becomes important.
The activities related to tracking inventory are labor and cost intensive, time-consuming and require close monitoring. The errors due to human limitations are hard to avoid. Image analytics and AI reduces the monitoring time substantially and gives unbiased, error-free results every time. Checking physical stock in terms of count, variants, brands, size of pack, consumer offer is just an image away.
Given this background, we believe the following could be some of the very compelling reasons to begin a continuous assessment of inventory.
- Right product in right type of shop: Many successful brands that caters to a wide variety of Target Groups cutting across SEC’s (Socio-Economic Classification) often adopt multiple packaging variants of the same product. Continuous monitoring will enable a brand to assess the availability of a right SKU in the right shop and neighborhood.
- Right product in the right market: monitor the spill overs of a product across various markets and identify dumping.
- Visible on-shelf quantity of SKU – is one of the key assessment metric having a direct impact on sales.
- Shelf appearance and tidiness of stacking – enables appropriate incentivizing of the retailer.
In a fast-changing competitive scenario accuracy and real-time analysis is imperative. The capacity to process millions of pictures and provide real-time insights makes image analytics a sure bet for brands. So as the saying goes “Look before you leap,” image analytics is a sure bet to make this happen.