miatzSign in

Auditing shelf stock and placement from a phone photograph

A field representative photographs the fixture; a detector locates and counts each product facing, compares it against the layout the account agreed, and returns out-of-stocks and misplacements as rows a supervisor can act on the same day instead of at month end.

Effort
Weeks of work
Skill level
Some technical skill
Organisation size
Mid-market
Value
Time saved, Quality

Tools named for this

  • A phone capture app that enforces a consistent framing and distance
  • A detector trained for densely packed, near-identical objects
  • The agreed layout for that account, held as data the detector is compared against

What to check before you ship it in India

  • Shoppers and store staff walk into frame, and a photograph is not anonymous because the shelf is its subject. Section 4(1) permits processing only for a lawful purpose and only on consent or one of the legitimate uses listed in section 7, and a passer-by in an aisle has given neither. The control that works sits at capture — frame tight, discard the wide shot — not in a promise to ignore the background.
  • A shelf photograph answers what is on the shelf, which is a different question from what was sold. Counts drift between the moment of capture and the moment anyone opens the report, and repeated identical packaging is the hardest case for a detector rather than the easiest.

Sources

Every claim on this page traces to one of these, on the date it was read.