Periodic Reporting for period 1 - V4RETAIL (VISION for RETAIL) Reporting period: 2015-07-01 to 2015-12-31 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project The current practice of supermarket shelf monitoring and auditing relies on the visual inspection of supermarket shelves by a human auditor. This visual inspection mainly involves recognizing packaged products, or stock keeping units (SKUs), displayed on the shelf and producing an approximate shelf share value for the monitored SKUs. The main concept of our innovative solution is to transfer this visual recognition task performed by the auditor to our software service, which can automatically recognize SKUs, hence produce detailed SKU counts using a few digital pictures of the supermarket shelf. Within this concept, the role of the human auditor is reduced to the relatively simpler job of taking shelf pictures via a mobile camera. Such an alternative automated process is capable of significantly reducing human recognition errors as well as producing much more accurate and detailed shelf share reports than a human auditor can provide. Very briefly, our software service accepts shelf pictures uploaded on our digital platform on the cloud, reconstructs a digital shelf panorama from them, automatically recognizes SKUs and records their positions on the shelves, and finally outputs an SKU count and shelf position report. To address the needs of the retailers and FMCG comğanies, Vispera has developed an end-to-end software service operating on a series of mobile, desktop and cloud-based software applications:(1) Vispera Shark is a smartphone application for in-store image and data collection. (2) Vispera Enterprise Solution (VES) is a digital merchandising software suite pertaining to the provision of commercial merchandising services based on proprietary visual recognition technology developed by Vispera. (3) Vispera Ocean is a web platform for mobile device configuration and management, Dashboard analytics and integrations to enterprise business systems.The goal of the current project was to carry out a two-fold feasibility/viability strudy involving practical/financial aspects and second, a market analysis task for market sizing as well as technology derivatives discovery. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far During the project we have carried out a thorough analysis of the retail market relevant to our existing solution and its potential derivatives. The initial target customer decomposition in terms of wholesalers, market research companies and retailers was further refined into a detailed market segmentation; total addressable market was more accurately estimated and a go to market strategy was generated. Consumer goods are goods which are intended for everyday private consumption. They cover a large product portfolio including food and non-food categories in order to meet consumer demand. They are further classified in fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) and slow moving consumer goods (SMCG). Our area of interest within the consumer goods industry is the FMCG market. We subdivided the FMCG market into food and beverage retail, personal care products, household cleaning products and tobacco products and anlyzed each group in detail, looking at market value, market trends, competitive landscape, largest clobal companies in these markets etc.We have also studied the retailers market segment as grocery retailers market and helath and beauty retaiers market similarly analyzing market value, business challanges, trends and opportunities, competitive landscape and we have also given the top retailers worldwise, their revenues and their market shares. We have outlined a go to market strategy in 3 phases:Phase 1: 2016-2017, Marketing in Turkey and Marketing via Ipsos worldwidePhase 2: 2017-2019, Marketing in English and Turkish speaking countries and Marketing via Ipsos worldwidePhase 3: 2018 and beyond, Marketing in countries with Latin alphabet and Marketing via Ipsos worldwideWe have identified some countries for each phase and given a list of leading retailers in each of these countries, their market share and the compounded annual growth rate of the industry in that country.We have also carried out an operational and financial scalability of the service currently being developed. Scalability analysis tackles the issue of estimating the automation level of the system, hence the human labor necessary to support operations as large as thousands of visits per month. Based on the market analysis and the scalability analysis we have carried out financial forecasts for the next 5 years. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) Acquiring accurate and real-time feedback on inventory distortions, such as out-of-stock, overstock and misplaced items is of paramount importance for all retail operations. In a recent study by IHL group [1], which was carried out in North America (US and Canada), EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), Asia/Pacific, and Latin America (including Mexico), this has been pinpointed as an $800 billion global problem for wholesalers/manufacturers, market researchers and retailers, which are naturally the target beneficiaries of the proposed project. In addition to real time feedback on inventory distortions, tracking share of shelp, compliance to planogram - avisual representations of a store's products or services, promotion compliance, Getting informed on competitor’s moves in the stores, measuring the performance of merch teams / sales teams, measuring the perfomance of different stores are of paramount importance to FMCG companies and retailers. img-8232-render.jpg
