A surveillance systems provider offers its clients automated control of product availability on café and store shelves
Customer
Our customer was AVS Services offering video surveillance services and doing business with retailers and companies in the catering industry.
Background
AVS Services clients want to continuously monitor the availability of goods in display cases, since they provide cooked food products and it is essential for them that the shelves are stocked throughout the working hours. Employees of cafes and retail outlets should ensure such availability. But employees need to serve customers, and there is no time left for checking missing items and replenishing display cabinets.
Business Challenge
AVS Services decided to offer its clients a solution to their problem — automatically identify out-of-stocks and analyze how empty spaces are stocked during the day. This will help determine fluctuations in demand and more accurately plan the workload of employees and amounts of products for cooking and/or purchase.
Solution
Usually Goods Checker is trained to recognise all SKUs, and only to identify the missing products.
This case was different, since the products were varying in every shelf and would usually be changed during the day, thus the traditional approach didn’t work. So we used a segmentation system that enabled Goods Checker to anonymously recognize all objects in a photo. In other words this allowed detecting gaps without even knowing what products are on the shelves.
All the data was processed and combined in dashboards for the management of the client to review. In addition, we developed a Messenger bot (WhatsApp, Telegram) that automatically sends notifications to cafe employees when a gap in a certain product category is detected.
The solution is deployed in IBA Group’s secure data center in Prague, Czech Republic. Goods Checker is GDPR compliant.
Result
With this project, AVS Services offered clients a solution to their problem – constant monitoring of fullness of shelves and employees’ work. Goods Checker helped determine when shelves are most often empty of goods, including their categories.
Other beneficiaries are the AVS clients’ employees, since now they receive the notifications about empty spaces on the shelves automatically.
When fully implemented, Goods Checker will help AVS Services clients ensure product availability on display and improve sales, and also adjust the amount of products on shelves in accordance with demand and significantly reduce the number of spoiled food.
The Goods Checker solution is now being prepared for scaling and commercial operation.