By implementing
product recognition capabilities in your store, you can unlock a large number
of improvements in your store operations and customer experiences. Your annual
counting and cycle counting can be completed faster. Automated shelf monitoring
can alert your staff to low stocks. The omnichannel experience of your website
and app customers can improve by informing them about product availability in
real-time.
All this is
possible in five steps. In implementing these steps, you'll see the many uses of
product recognition in your retail environment and the crucial role of computer
vision and deep learning in enabling it.
Step 1: Initial
Setup — a Deep Learning Pipeline for Visual Search
A visual search engine is at the heart of this entire system
because you'll be needing it for every subsequent step.
Step 2: Include Product Recognition in Your Inventory and
Stockroom Workflows
With the visual search engine ready, you need to start
populating its database with your product images.
The best time to do this is when your staff is adding new
products to your inventory management system (IMS). You probably already have
some workflow where your staff unboxes the pallets from the warehouse, records
product details and SKUs in your IMS, prints out barcode labels, and transfers
different products to your stockroom shelves.
Step 3: Add Product Recognition to Your Shelf Cameras
Fixing cameras in your shelf areas enables many features
that improve operational efficiencies
Step 4: Equip Your Staff With Easy-to-Use Applications to
Manage Product Recognition
In addition to the devices fixed to your shelves, it’s a
good idea to incorporate your product recognition system into smartphone apps
to help your staff with their work.
Step 5: Improve the Real-Time Shopping Experience for Your
Customers
Improvements in your business operations are good reasons to
adopt such a system but they pale in front of increased revenues from happy
customers. A product recognition system can actually improve the omnichannel
user experience of your customers.
