The exciting technology trends shaping the future of consumer packaged goods in retail
Despite the many advances in retail execution technology over the past decade, many
brands still struggle to maintain their competitive advantages. Facing rising competition from powerful online retailers, traditional bricks-and-mortar stores are under enormous pressure
to innovate quickly and provide an in-store experience that keeps consumers coming back.
New solutions promise to transform the sector in the years ahead. Artificial intelligence turns complex data sets into actionable insights that can drive more sales. Computer vision enables the automation of shelf space auditing. Internet of things (IoT) applications canreveal location-based insights, such as stock levels, compliance, and share of shelf. The listgoes on.
It’s time for retail managers to rethink their approach to retail execution and realize thebenefits of automation. Digital innovation should be an overarching goal moving forward, since it’s the one way to overcome the many challenges facing the sector.
Here are some of the ways tech is set to change retail in 2021:
Automated shelf space auditing
Shelf space auditing is one of the most repetitive and time-consuming tasks in the retail sector, but thanks to technology, it’s also an area that’s ripe for improvement. Historically, stores relied on pen and paper for auditing, which meant a higher risk of human error, more work involved transcribing findings into digital form, and delayed transmission of insights to decision makers.
Today, thanks to the rise of computer vision solutions, it’s possible to automate many of the more burdensome auditing processes. For example, image analyses uses images captured from smartphones or internet-connected cameras to instantly identify which items are out of stock, which SKUs are out of date, or whether a product is in the wrong place.
Automated shelf space auditing doesn’t just reduce the burden on your employees — it reduces human error, and ensures your store shelves always align with your planogram.
This improves the customer experience and drives sales, not least because
70% of consumers make their buying decisions at the point of purchase
. After all, not even your most loyal shoppers can buy what they’re looking for if it’s out of stock or misplaced.
Streamlined compliance checks
When you have thousands of different brands and products spanning your store shelves, it’s much harder to keep everything in check and ensure your planogram aligns with the real state of your store shelves. Meeting the challenges of scale, especially in venues like hypermarkets, is even harder, especially if you’re fully reliant on manual processes.
From smart store shelves equipped with RFID tags to computer vision models, technology is
transforming retail management. These solutions streamline compliance checks and reduce
errors by automatically identifying products with incorrect pricing, consumable goods that are past their sale-by dates, and items in the wrong location.
Delivery of data-driven insights
Keeping up with the world of online retail has proven enormously challenging for bricks-and- mortar stores, largely because of the lack of automation and data-driven insights. For online retailers, the entire purchase process happens digitally, which means the data is immediately available for retail managers to analyze. In retail stores, it’s normally a very different matter, due to the delayed transmission of data collected from shelf audits.
Powered by computer vision and artificial intelligence, modern retail software can collect
data directly from the store shelves and make it available to managers instantly through a cloud-hosted dashboard. In other words, if a product is out of stock, has incorrect pricing, is in the wrong place, or is past its sale by date, managers will know about it instantly, instead
of having to wait for a manual report.
By integrating these systems into your sales force automation platform, you can streamline
the entire retail process, both to the benefit of employees
and customers. At the same time, managers have a raft of valuable data readily available to them. This allows them to implement changes faster, evaluate the overall state of their store shelves, and make informed decisions on how to better run their businesses.
Inspector Cloud is changing the CPG sector with its award-winning image recognition
solution. Our powerful, AI-driven software slashes retail audit times, eliminates human error,
and offers a detailed analysis of store efficiency.
Get in touch today to find out more