Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOS26.4.2017
The ShopView solution, developed by Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, Sonae MC and Wedo Technologies, was tested at the international retailer SPAR Austria. Using state of the art image processing technology, this prototype aims to help retailers to manage store replenishment processes.
Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS in cooperation with Sonae MC – the food retail market leader in Portugal with several distinctive business segments, both in food & non-food products and services, and with over 800 stores – and Wedo Technologies developed the ShopView2Market project, a highly innovative solution to help food retailers improve their product replenishment processes.
The ShopView solution uses state of the art image processing technology, together with a semi-automatic device, to compare shelf layout and product placement plans (planograms) with actual in-store product displays, thus detecting wrong product location and out-of-stock situations.
Verification of compliance with predefined store and shelf layouts is a recurrent activity performed by retailers at each store through a manual and time consuming process. Wrong product placement and out-of-stock scenarios are a cause of diminishing revenues, contractual penalties with suppliers and decreasing consumer satisfaction.
Following the public demonstration of the ShopView2Market project in Portugal, on January 9th, the solution was successfully tested during an international demonstration at SPAR Austria on January 24th. The store selected for the demonstration was a Eurospar 2.000 m2 supermarket located in Salzburg.
With over 12.000 stores in over 40 countries, SPAR is one of the largest food retailers worldwide. Michael Pecher, Head of Branch Coordination at SPAR Austria and member of their Innovation Board, referred at the end of the demonstration that “the prototype works and can help solve a business challenge for retailers, thus helping serve our customers better”.
This international demonstration follows a fruitful cooperation between Sonae MC and SPAR Austria, namely in the domains of knowledge sharing and best practices benchmarking through our immersion Exchange Experience program.
According to Nuno Lopes Gama, Head of Innovation at Sonae, “this project, and subsequence test pilot, is a high-end cooperation between our company and the technological partners that lead to an extremely high efficient use of image technology due to the merge of several different “know-how”, allowing the first step in what could become a major leap in retailer’s operations. The first results make us believe that all together we are creating a major breakthrough in replenishment processes.”.
Martin Gleiss, Head of Logistics at SPAR Austria states “the stay of the ShopView team at one of our SPAR supermarkets in order to do a proof-of-concept of the system showed the innovative spirit of Sonae and its partners. The potential of the automatic out-of-shelf and planogram-checks is evident and definitely relevant for us.”.
The ShopView2Market project was supported by the National Innovation Agency (ANI) in Portugal through the Portugal 2020 ‘R&D Incentive System – Co-Promotion Demonstration Projects’ scheme that fosters applied research and development.