Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSThe ShopView project, developed by Fraunhofer Portugal, won the ’Sonae Companies Innovation Award 2015’, among 37 participants. The ’Sonae Companies Innovation Awards’ are given annually to the most innovative project and, every year, dozens of projects apply for it.
Since 2012, the distinctions are awarded during Sonae’s annual internal conventions, kindling the spirit of belonging, the recognition of teams, and the culture of innovation. In the 2015 edition, 37 projects have applied for the awards, three of which received an honorable mention and ShopView was crowned winner.
This distinction reinforces the importance of this innovative solution designed to validate the implementation of store planograms. The ShopView compares the layout of the products on the shelves with the actual displays in order to help detect errors and opportunities. Developed by Fraunhofer Portugal in partnership with WeDo Technologies and Modelo Continente, ShopView is co-funded by FEDER through COMPETE – Programa Operacional Temático Fatores de Competitividade and was approved under SI ID&T – individual project, in accordance AAC nº 08/SI/2012.
According to Jorge Liz, Head of Space Planning of Sonae, “the cooperation with Fraunhofer within the ShopView project has been excellent”. Fraunhofer looks forward to continuing to participate in projects with high expectations for innovation and imminent applicability in the industry such as the ShopView project.
About the ShopView project
Planning the shop layout is one of the most crucial tasks in the retail business nowadays. The right placement of products in a modern supermarket determines significantly the number of sold items.
To maximize the overall income, supermarkets optimize the shelf layout and put products with a high profit margin on prominent places in the aisles. The manufactures of the products are willing to pay the supermarkets a so called shelf rent, in order to influence the shop layout and to promote their own goods. The wrong placement of a product might therefore not only result in worse revenue, but also in contractual penalties. As the shop layout changes frequently, there is a permanent need for control which involves high costs since currently the task must be manually performed.
The aim of the ShopView project is to automate the task of controlling the implementation of planograms, by creating a system which utilizes state of the art image processing technology to recognize misplaced products. The system consists of a semi-automatic device to take images of the supermarket and software which performs the image processing and compares the real world data with the information stored in the planning software of the supermarket. The ShopView system significantly decreases the rate of wrong product placements while decreasing costs of control at the same time.
The ShopView project is estimated to save 5 million euros per year, in costs of operations of the Continente stores by Sonae. Its world-wide sales are under consideration.