agosto 2, 2022

The coffee business requires a sophisticated approach to attract coffee enthusiasts. The shelves in retail stores with packed coffee must look well-organized not only to please customers. Coffee businesses must maintain compliance with Perfect Store requirements. That is why sales representatives should make an accurate and fast shelf audit and make the work with different types of packaging, prices, POSM, and secondary displays in retail faster and drive excellence in the point of sale.

Many companies are actively experimenting with image recognition, artificial intelligence, guided selling, omnichannel sales, revenue growth management, but all these technologies work as required only if complete and reliable data is available in real-time.

Holistic Sales Digitalization Platform

A leading FMCG Coffee Company used disparate solutions in several markets to manage sales and promotions, resulting in significant manual work and data processing delays.

Challenge

Having two systems for merchandisers and sales representatives​ led to delays in data processing, inconsistent approach to business, and conflicting KPIs. Additionally, the sales staff had the disconnection of supply planning, promo planning and execution, could not meet customer needs due to slow supplier responses, and lacked effectiveness and transparency of trade investments. ​

Solution

The first step in the transformation process was to transition to the integrated SFA & DMS, which later evolved into the Holistic Sales Digitalization Platform. The sales platform was underpinned by automated sales management processes that included order management, predicted orders, a full promotional compliance process, and integrated journey planning.

Result

The creation of holistic sales digitalization platform helps the company to achieve the following improvements:

• 20% growth in coverage with stable FTE
• 9% savings for office structure
• 30% optimization for distributor system optimization
• 99% data accuracy

IR for Shelf Audit Automatization

One of the main factors that facilitated the move from manual to automated processes was the introduction of Coffee Shelf Audit Automatization with AI Shelf Recognition during in-store visits. As it was fully integrated with SFA this ensured a quick and efficient shelf audit, including recognition of all SKUs (including competitors), prices, POSM, and secondary displays.

Within just 3 weeks of enabling it, the first results of using AI Shelf Recognition by the sales team were outstanding:

• 97%+ SKUs Recognition Accuracy
• Less than 10 sec from photos to report
• Less than 10 minutes for the visit
• 87%+ of SKU price recognition (both paper and electronic price tags)
• Automated KPIs calculation for the whole coffee category
• Offline/online mode

AI Shelf Recognition provides not only full visibility of products, prices, POSM, but also insights for the user in real-time of what needs to be done and how it should be done based on in-flight analytics and constant analysis of planograms, stock lists, and the overall situation at the store based on defined terms and conditions of Perfect Store.