Few aspects of retailing are as fundamental as fully stacked shelves, and few concerns rank higher with an ever more demanding customer than product availability. Regardless, on-shelf availability remains a huge challenge for the industry. Growing, more dynamic product portfolios, staff and cost cuts combined with an increasingly complex supply chain have increased the challenge.

Cover of the OOS whitepaper by Lokad

While shelf availability is a top concern for customers and retailers alike, even the Tier I retailers today mostly rely on manual checks by store staff. This puts a large burden on employees, and response times to out-of-shelf situations are slow.

However, grocery retailers a crossed Europe and the US have started to explore technology that can help address the problem. With this in mind, we have published a whitepaper on out-of-shelf monitoring technology which gives an overview of

  • Objectives of out-of-shelf monitoring systems
  • Introduction to the technology
  • Definition of performance characteristics
  • Quantification of system capabilities and limitations

Are we missing some interesting aspects of this type of technology, or do you have experience with OOS monitoring systems you want to share? Please let us know in the comments.