Business

Drones are an important part of the contemporary industrial landscape. From large UAVs, to microdrones, they are simplifying the tasks of aerial inspection and object detection. Drones are a great asset when it comes to inspect tall structures, vast areas or other places which are hazardous to oversight for human workers. In the last few years they made inspection safer, faster and cost-efficient.

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, retail changed in a fortnight. Extra safety precautions, panic buying, fights over the last toilet paper rolls and understaffed stores – this is the new grocer reality! In these difficult times retailers are turning to AI solutions to support operational continuity.

Entrepreneurship and export development agency “Enterprise Lithuania” indicates that due to COVID-19 pandemic Lithuanian exports of services could shrink by 10 to 25 percent. Technology and communications sector is listed among the most affected. However, leading Lithuanian technology companies are displaying crisis immunity – retaining the order volume and tackling the downturn in close cooperation. 

On shelf availability (OSA) estimates the time and percentage a product is available for sale to customers on a store shelf. It is one of the key performance indicators for fast moving consumer goods analytics. The metric has direct correlation with out of stock rate and its impact can be measured by sales volume lost compared to actual sales.

Nobody likes waiting in lines. According to research, people spend from 3 to 5 days per year queuing up. That might add up to 6 months of waiting for things during a person’s lifetime! Long queues at the supermarket cause shopper fatigue, decrease customer experience and result in shopping cart abandonment.

In my 20+ years in retail I learned one thing: retail loves precision! Retail managers are obsessed with key metrics: sales per square foot, average transaction value, year on year sales and many more to evaluate your store performance. However, there is a key problem with this approach - the tracking is done on the store level. Sure, you can compare performance with other stores. But it gives little insight on what needs to be changed to improve performance. 

The age of perfect customer experience is upon us. Although many shoppers turned online, physical stores are still the best way to convey the brand's message and present your products. Top level brands invest a lot into carefully crafted ‘retail experiences’. So why does shopping at an Apple store or Nike shop makes you feel good?

With closure of several big box and department store chains, it became all too familiar to call brick and mortar retailing doomed. But despite a paradigm shift towards e-commerce, online retailing is still dwarfed by sales numbers from physical stores.

Customer always comes first. But even the best customer service standards ‘on paper’ are challenging to implement on the shop floor. New Computer Vision (CV) monitoring solution by technology company Agmis enables retailers to measure the efficiency of shop assistant performance and provides objective quantifiable metrics to further improve the experience of customers.