4 Reasons to Implement IR
July 22, 2022
Image recognition (IR) is one of the key technologies that reached the plateau of productivity for Consumer Goods Manufacturers and delivered rapid results for the business. You cannot overestimate the transformational impact of IR once an FCMG company has it implemented into its work processes. Sales personnel immediately gets a straightforward automated approach to work with the shelf and orders, while a company receives real-time, accurate, and complete data from the store and develops its business.
Of course, IR brings indispensable benefits. Yet before IR implementation, we suggest our clients define the reason why they want to have it. As your first step towards IR implementation, we recommend specifying and evaluating the potential benefits IR can offer for your current business processes.
Reasons to Implement IR
- Cost optimization
- Sales growth
- Perfect Retail Execution
- Holistic and real-time view
1. Cost Optimization
Time optimization means cost optimization. If your business systems are integrated with image recognition, your field force can significantly reduce the time spent on shelf work. IR eliminates manual by automating data collection, which is especially beneficial when the field force should work in a large retail environment. Automated data collection can save around 30% of the time for shelf audit and, thus, decrease the cost of working in the field by 60%.
If your business integrates an offline IR solution, it will reduce the time for visits even more: the field force doesn’t have to send pictures to a server, so the work goes faster. And there is no need to pay for using the vendor’s computing capacities.
2. Sales Growth
Once your team is equipped with image recognition, they can focus more on sales growth instead of data collection and checking OSA and OOS.
The image recognition technology allows the field staff to take a photo of the shelf and quickly collect valuable data, which is more time-consuming to do manually. The saved time can be spent on checking the issues with product availability, understanding the reasons of OOS, and overall, on crafting the right strategy for growing sales. With IR, customers can react fast and improve OSA.
3. Perfect Retail Execution
Image recognition has the potential to become an assistant for sales teams and perform some tasks much better than humans. IR can provide a “Planograms Validation vs. Reality” feature to allow the field force to quickly identify issues with product availability, provide hints on how to address them in real-time, and resolve inconsistencies immediately.
4. Holistic and Real-Time View
Image recognition may enable new performance metrics which are hardly achievable within the traditional operation model. The field staff can monitor their own and competitors’ products, prices, POSM, main shelves and secondary displays, etc. For example, the company representative can easily understand if their brand has a fair share of the shelf within a specific sub-category, even if they need to track hundreds of competitors’ SKUs. This data is available during the visit which allows the field staff to take address existing issues in no time and with all necessary metrics and recommendations.
Is it one reason you choose IR or all four at once?
Image recognition can improve your sales work in all the aspects mentioned above or it can influence all of them at once. Of course, the business would better focus on one of the reasons for implementing IR to achieve the greatest results from the very start. However, with time, the company will be able to cover all these reasons and put its business on a whole new level of productivity.
If you are willing to set your priorities to implement IR with the vendor that fits your needs, learn deployment best practices, find out industry-standard key performance indicators and get the most out of IR, you can download our Guide for Successful Image Recognition Deployment by submitting the form below.