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Trax Announces Partnership With Google Cloud to Digitize Retail Stores
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January 10, 2019 News

 

Trax and Google Cloud have partnered to bring Trax’s breakthrough image recognition and machine learning capability to retail stores. As the leading provider of computer vision solutions for retail, Trax allows retailers to take advantage of real-time shelf insights at unprecedented speed and scale.

Trax’s Retail Watch on Google Cloud Platform uses Trax industry-leading image recognition engines and Trax Shelfie Cameras – IoT cameras, affixed to the shelf, custom-designed to cover the entire store, and paired with the speed and security of Google Cloud and Edge computing capabilities – to produce actionable, time-sensitive data about every SKU on the shelf.

Compared to a retail POS that tracks stock in real time, Trax’s solution is computer vision-powered which allows continuous store monitoring. This provides innumerable data that POS doesn’t.

Retailers deploying the Trax Retail Watch SaaS solution, powered by Google Cloud, will leverage advanced artificial intelligence to be able to rapidly identify missing SKUs, confirm planogram compliance and take other critical steps toward optimizing retail execution inside the physical store, all with the ultimate goal of increasing shelf availability and improving the shopper experience.

Trax, headquartered in Singapore, currently works with two-thirds of the world’s leading CPG companies. The Retail Watch solution which is Google Cloud Platform-based is available worldwide, including Asia. Currently, they have deployments in Europe thus far.

Two leading global retailers have moved forward to the next stage of deployment of the Trax Retail Watch solution, expanding both the number of stores and the number of shelf products they are digitizing. These moves follow pilots that have highlighted the accuracy and reliability of a system that allows for replacement of costly, time-consuming manual processes – increasing overall SKU availability, reducing out-of-stock duration and generating marked sales uplift.

According to David Gottlieb, Managing Director of Trax Americas, “A 2018 Trax survey of 300 senior industry professionals found that 53% of respondents were not satisfied with the quality of their compliance tracking methods.”

Computer vision (CV) solutions are helping retailers address this challenge by providing them with “eyes in the store” and automating store monitoring. Computer vision technology allows retailers and manufacturers to compare images of the actual shelf or a realogram with the planogram for each category, and thus measure compliance.

“At NRF 2019 in New York this month, we’re excited to be demonstrating how Google Cloud and Trax provide our retail customers the ability to ride the wave of increased cloud capabilities, advanced machine-learning algorithms and reduced imaging-sensor costs to digitize the shelf and create new powerful applications: for increasing product availability, better management of in-store inventory, and creating new customer experiences, such as augmented-reality (AR) guided shopping,” said Mark Cook, Trax’s VP for Retail, based in San Francisco.

Cook continued: “Google Cloud provides the secure computing power to capture tens of thousands of SKUs across an entire store within milliseconds and produce real-time insights with our image recognition engines that can rapidly address any out-of-stocks or other shelf-execution gaps.”

Joel Bar-El, Trax’s CEO and co-founder, added: “About 90% of shopping worldwide is still done in physical stores. It’s our mission to provide ‘eyes in the store’ on every SKU. Working with Google Cloud, we can help retailers leverage image recognition to transform their overall operations: to improve on-shelf availability, forecasting, click-and-collect processes, and, ultimately, to modernize the shopping experience as online and offline converge.”

“In today’s ever-changing industry, retailers must evolve quickly to get ahead of customer expectations,” said Pravin Pillai, Global Head of Retail Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. “We’re delighted to partner with Trax on its Retail Watch solution, which will help to digitally transform the retail industry.”

 

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