News

BE FRESHER, SELL MORE AND WASTE LESS!

Ensure customer satisfaction, increase sales and reducing loss and waste, recommendations how to achieve this is the content of new model of collaboration Food Waste Collaboration Maturity Model developed by ECR Community Shrink & On-Shelf-Availability European working group, presented by end of November in Prague. Prague, December 7th 2017 – New collaboration model collects results of join Research realized by Oliver Wyman and Kuehne Logistics University in Hamburg together with three European retailers.

ECR OSA HP and Image Recognition technology were presented to the European ECR Community.

Now you can point camera on a shelf and determine the goods on it, and it can be done quickly without connecting to the Internet – this is possible using the Image Recognition technology demonstrated by ECR Russia and Neuromation company (Sergey Nikolenko, Maxim Prasolov) at the meeting of ECR national offices in Milan 28-29 September.

13th Annual ECR Forum was held in Moscow on September 13-14th

How was it:
- More than 1300 delegates from 100 companies representing FMCG and retail.
- 2 days of parallel sessions on the directions: Enabling technologies, Supply Chain, Shopper, Master Data, Digital transformation.
- 3 plenary sessions with the participation of top executives of the leading companies in the industry.
- 35 partner cases and best practices from leading experts.

On the first day of the Forum, the ECR Eco-System was introduced.
ECR Eco-System is a platform of interconnected technologies and services developed by the ECR Russia Community to solve business problems of both suppliers and retail chains.

The services were presented:

1. ECR Laboratory - Laboratory for creating a digital passport of goods, as well as product models for subsequent recognition by Image Recognition technology.
2. RusCat - A single Master Data Catalog catalog for retail chains and manufacturers: www.ruscat.org
3. On-Shelf-Availability Hybrid Platform (OSA HP) - a service for the on shelf availability in real time: www.osahp.com
4. Image Recognition - real-time recognition service.

The main topic of the Forum was the implementation of digital technologies into FMCG and retail industry.
The four most actively growing directions were presented at the session called Viva Technologies:
- Image recognition (Neuromation)
- Chat bots and robots for head-hunting (X5 Retail Group)
- On-Shelf-Availabilty Hybrid Platform (ECR OSA HP).
- Technology of trust – Blockchain

The implementation of these technologies is impossible without effective master data management. The ways of providing business with clear and reliable master data have been discussed at the session called "Clear master data is the key to Big Data".

The sessions devoted to the government regulation in the FMCG industry, experts discussed the specifics of working with the EGAIS and Mercury system.

Several best practices were presented in the block of sessions on supply chain management, including the project of joint planning by Mars and X5 Retail Group: resulted in a 13% increase in forecast accuracy and 2% in service level.

At several Shopper sessions both global and Russian trends in the development of trade marketing, joint category management and new digital channels in promo were presented.

9 cases were nominated for ECR Award this year and the winners are:
«Customized strategy for joint development of the dairy category», Danone+Lenta in nomination “Innovation”,
Successful experience in implementing FRT, Mars+Metro C&C in nomination “Partnership”,
“School of joint business planning”, Mars+X5 Retail Group in nomination “The Economic effect’.

More details about the program, speakers and presentations of the Forum can be found at:

http://ecrforum.ru

International Cyber Warriors Take On Retail Cyber Security Threats

Retailers, with their voucher schemes and loyalty programs, hold vast amounts of data not only about our financial and personal details, but also our purchasing habits. Also in retail, there are so many points of entry for the hacker through the points of sale or the supply chain, for example. Compare this to the fact that retailers have under-invested in retail cyber security over many years, and this makes them an obvious target for data breaches from hackers looking for fullz information.

Pinterest deepens retail integrations with new visual search tech

Pinterest's focus on consumer lifestyles and aesthetics has long made social commerce a natural fit for the platform, and the latest offerings т Shop the Look, especially т allow for easier product search and less friction on the path to purchase. Brands have often struggled to measure and prove ROI for their social marketing efforts but deeper retail integrations from Pinterest could bolster these strategies, and the site has strong early partners like Target and Wayfair coming on board.

On-line Retailing and Ecommerce - Effect on Traditional Stores

The growth of online sales at the current rate will inevitably reduce the market for traditional shops. By the time that online sales represent 5% or more of domestic retailing then the continued growth of online retailers is likely to come at the expense of conventional stores. In Europe as a whole, online retailers in 2016 are expanding by 16.7% in a fairly stagnant retail market, hence sales through stores are expected to diminish by -1.5% overall this year, and as much as -4.3% in the UK. The comparable figure in the U.S. is -2.2%. This is creating major strategic issues for store-based retailers. For policymakers, the results will be fewer physical stores and reduced employment in this key sector.

How premium retailers are giving growth

Market polarisation has been one of the defining trends of recent years. We have seen the тbig fourт (Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsburyтs, Asda) lose ground to discounters and premium retailers. While discountersт role is well documented, itтs worth taking a closer look at why premium retailers like Booths, Waitrose and Whole Foods Market are doing well. Premium retailers concentrate on what makes them unique: providing high quality or specialist products in upmarket stores. They balance this with supplying the leading brands that shoppers want. Even during tough economic times, they resist the pressure to tone this identity down.

Amazon opens a self-driving styled convenience store т with no checkouts

Amazonтs newest brick-and-mortar concept, Amazon Go, uses the latest in technology to offer a very different type of grocery shopping experience т one that makes self-checkout look old fashioned. Shoppers click on the new Amazon Go app as they enter the store, and hold their smartphone to a scanner similar to an airport security line. Every time the customer picks up an item, it is automatically added to their virtual cart. (If the shopper puts the item back on the shelf, the item is automatically removed from the cart.) Once the customer leaves the store, their purchased is billed to their Amazon.com account. Amazon broke the news about the concept via a video on its website. Explaining the technology behind Amazon Go, the retailer credited a combination of тcomputer vision,т тdeep learning algorithms,т and тsensor fusion much like youтd find in self-driving cars.т

Cultural Shift: How Shoppers Now Use Neighborhood Supermarkets

As more and more staple purchases of center-store product have moved to alternative channels, including e-commerce, the net effect has been for consumers to fill their baskets and carts more and more with fresh and special-occasion foodsтІas well as convenient fill-in purchases. The massive pantry-stocking carts of yesteryear are very hard to see anymore. The result is that we are seeing American consumers increasingly use their neighborhood supermarket as they once used specialty stores. And the supermarket chains that have seen this trend early are already shifting their stores upmarket to simulate a specialty-store experience, primarily in the perimeter departments. Kroger, Raleyтs and Schnucks are perhaps three of the best examples in the past five years.

WILL MORE CUSTOMER DATA MEAN THE END OF DISCOUNTING?

How can the Uber model be applied to retail? Different customers may place different value on an item; retailers use one price, then end up discounting across the board т leading to lost profits. If retailers could customize prices for those who value items more and those who value them less, it creates a win-win: a customer surplus and higher profits. But in order to understand what value an item has to a customer, retailers need more data about them. A woman wandering into a shop could decide a designer handbag she loved just wasnтt worth the price and then wander out т all without retailers getting any feedback.

XIII ECR Annual Forum will take place in Moscow 13-14 September 2017.