The management of Danone Russia JSC recommended Intelligence Retail, a resident of the Skolkovo Foundation’s IT-cluster, as the provider of services for automated shelf merchandise recognition.
The recommendation was made following the results of the pilot implementation of Intelligence Retail’s solution at the enterprises of Danone Group in Russia under the agreement signed in June 2017. The purpose of the above agreement was to check the quality of recognition of dairy products using Image Recognition technology and to assess the opportunities to shorten the time for audit of sales points by field staff.
For successful pilot implementation, the following objectives were set:
Background
Intelligence Retail solution is based on the use of computer vision technologies to recognize goods of various categories in order to control the availability and correctness of the goods display in the sales network. The system allows a field employee of a company within 10 seconds to obtain the necessary information on the assortment and display. Online analytics in stores can improve the efficiency of visits, eliminating the manual information collection. Online merchandise recognition at the level of SKU, prices and other information on the photo gives new opportunities to improve the sales efficiency. The extended analytics based on the results of visits allows a company to respond quicker to market changes, including in relation to the issues of assortment management and qualitative and quantitative distribution management.
As part of the pilot project, the system was trained to recognize more than 400 Danone SKUs, the solution was implemented with an involvement of a pilot group of field employees (merchandisers, sales representatives, using the solution on iOS and Android platforms and the analytics web portal, in the Moscow Region). The system preparation took 1 month (June 2017), the trial operation took 1 month (July 2017), and then the period of operation started (August 2017).
Within the period of operational use, the following results were achieved:
Based on these results, the management of Danone Group in Russia recommended the use of Intelligence Retail solution at the group’s enterprises.
Sergey Baramzin, CEO Intelligence Retail
“It was a really interesting job for us; it is a new product category difficult in terms of merchandise recognition, high requirements to the speed of solution operation, a wide range of products and some peculiarities of performance calculation. Project teams of both companies, Danone and Intelligence Retail, put in great efforts to achieve the maximum results on a tight schedule.
We are thankful to Danone for the opportunity to implement the joint project and looking forward to our cooperation in the future.”
Adrian-Valentin Pascu, VP Sales Danone
“Danone is constantly searching for new instruments to increase the efficiency of its field team. Image Recognition technology is one of the solutions that could improve the quality of work of the field team, as well as the quality and trustworthiness of information received from field employees. Thanks to Intelligence Retail, we managed to test its image recognition solutions within the shortest possible time and realized that this technology and, in particular, its image recognition solution is suitable to be used for dairy products.
We are thankful to Intelligence Retail for cooperation in this project and looking forward to continuing our work together.”
Olga Strelova, Director of Retail & FMCG technologies center at Skolkovo Foundation
“Cooperation of a Skolkovo company with the leading manufacturer of fast moving consumer goods stipulates compliance of the solution presented by Intelligence Retail with the global requirements to development quality; and the Foundation expertise confirms a high qualification of the team and unique technological components of the image recognition solution.”
Reference information
Danone Group in Russia is part of international Groupe Danone, which is represented on five continents and holds leading positions in four areas of healthy food production: dairy products, baby food, water, and specialized food. Danone owns 190 production centres and employs about 100 thousand employees. In Russia, Danone Group owns 17 enterprises. The number of employees is about 10,000 people. In Russia, the company is represented in four business areas: dairy products, baby food, specialized food, and water.
Danone Group in Russia is the leader in the production of dairy products. By 2017 the volume of investments amounted to about USD 2.2 billion. The company produces goods under such brands as Prostokvashino, Activia, Actimel, Rastishka, Tema, Danissimo, Danone, Biobalance, Actual, Smeshariki, etc.
Intelligence Retail is a leader in the Image Recognition and Retail Analytics, it has been a resident of Skolkovo since 2016, won several awards and grants in this field. The company has participated in foreign and Russian exhibitions. Intelligence Retail provides the automated service of the shelf merchandise recognition, and on-line comprehensive analytical data from sales locations. Services of Intelligence Retail allow measuring the on-shelf availability, compliance with the standards of the layout, the share of shelf, etc.
The Skolkovo Foundation is a non-profit organization established by the initiative of the President of the Russian Federation in September 2010. The Foundation is aimed at mobilization of resources of Russia in the field of modern applied research through creation of favourable environment for scientific research in five priority areas of technological development: energy efficiency, space, biomedicine, nuclear and computer technologies. The Foundation is entrusted with the management of the project on creation of the Skolkovo Innovation Center, which is regulated by a special law providing the participating companies (over 1,700 companies at the moment) with special economic conditions. The total revenue of the participating companies is more than 130 billion roubles. They provided the employment to 22.1 thousand persons and received 1,100 patents. The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), a research institute established and functioning with the support of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an important part of the Skolkovo ecosystem. By 2020, over 2 million square meters of production, office and residential premises will be built in Skolkovo, 35,000 people will work in the innovation center. Website: www.sk.ru
Press Contact
Lyubov Korotetskaya
lkorotetskaya@sk.ru