Joel Bar-El, CEO In today's fiercely competitive retail environment, gathering insights on how products look, perform and persuade on the shelf is extremely business-critical. The procedure for the same however is expensive, tedious with limited results and untimely data. The challenge mainly lies in managing and understanding the shelf execution when it comes to the store level. So, in many cases, retailers employ a category management at the back office which will know how to plan shelf settings, shelf placements and planograms. However, they possess limited knowledge when it comes to in-store execution on a daily basis.
Headquartered in Singapore, Trax has emerged as a major game changer in the retail industry with their breakthrough image recognition technology. “Specifically, Trax is focused on an area that until today was a type of a grey area – shelf execution visibility,” says Joel Bar-El, CEO, Trax. The company provides a more accurate, consistent and reliable way for the organizations associated with consumer goods to understand how their products are performing in the marketplace. Sales representatives put the Trax mobile application to use by taking pictures of the store shelves from their smartphones and tablets. These pictures are sent to the Trax cloud and within minutes, they receive actionable measurements and recommendations on how to improve their product visibility in the store.
Aiding the analytics arena for retail, Trax provides a number of solutions. Trax Retail Watch offers the company a continuous read over the shelf placements in the retail environment on a daily basis. Trax Retail Watch benefits retailers by providing real-time execution alerts.
Specifically, Trax is focused on an area that until today was a type of a grey area – shelf execution visibility
Whenever there is a situation of products being out of stock or getting misplaced on the shelf, Trax Retail Watch detects any on-shelf gaps and provides automated alerts and reports around corrective actions to be taken were it matters the most-at the shelf.
Concurrently, Trax’s Retail Execution solution has been leveraged by manufacturers globally. “Essentially, we are harnessing this type of technology in the hands of sales representatives for global manufacturing,” says Bar-El. When these sales representatives are visiting the store, they can take images of their servicing and get a real-time read over the execution level of the retailer on the shelf.
Talking about the current technological trends that are prevalent in the retail analytics landscape, Bar-El believes that the world at large is adapting to automated real-time information. This information is gathered across the board in different type of retail domains, channels, and retail segments. “There are very few technologies available that enables sales representatives to get a read on shelf positioning and merchandising standard in an automated way and in real-time from the vast store universe,” explains Bar-El. “What sets Trax apart is that we are able to tap into a very important set of data that is quite difficult to obtain when it comes to shelf placement,” he affirms.
The company has successfully ensured a high dominance in the Asia Pacific and European markets in the past with numerous global clients using their services. Drawing a roadmap of the company’s future, Bar-El says, “Our focus this year will be on the U.S. market. We’re going to open three offices in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco. We have already established a subsidiary in the U.S. and we're going to execute this market in a big way,” he concludes.
