Florida sales and marketing agency Acosta is working with Texas-based Pensa Systems to provide actionable shelf intelligence for retailers.

The aim is to drive revenue growth for CPG brands and retailers with accurate retail shelf visibility, strategic business insights and in-store execution.

This partnership brings together Acosta’s business intelligence, analytics, in-store data collection and merchandising across the retail landscape and the shelf intelligence of Pensa.

“We are excited to collaborate with Pensa to deliver the source of truth for what’s happening on the retail shelf through computer vision and advanced AI,” said John Carroll, president of digital commerce at Acosta. “Our combined capabilities will accelerate sales and trade, optimise retail operations, and further drive category RoI at the shelf for our customers.”

Pensa provides CPG retailers and brands with an accurate view of shelf inventory through continuous, automated monitoring of actual shelf conditions. Employing patented motion-based computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI), Pensa captures and then analyses hundreds of images of each individual product on the shelf, creating a 3D digital reconstruction of shelf inventory conditions with a 98% accuracy.

The end-to-end capture to insight process requires no new hardware, no planograms and no reference images from the manufacturer or related upkeep of a reference library. A total picture of actual shelf inventory conditions is created with all competitor and private label products on an entire shelf captured.

In partnership with Acosta, Pensa informs various key performance indicators, including on-shelf availability (OSA), space optimisation, shelf compliance and promotional effectiveness, showing changes that lead to better revenue lift. The ease and speed of the process – an entire aisle can be captured by any hand-held device in less than 17 seconds – allows for learnings to be applied more quickly and more accurately than traditional practices of using point-of-sale (PoS) data, sometimes together with back-room inventory data.

Pensa’s support on out-of-stock reduction translates directly to increased sales. Acosta lends expert business intelligence to review and analyse shelf performance, creating tools such as alerts to mitigate out of stocks, methods to optimise replenishment processes, pricing strategies based on elasticity and profitability, measurement of brand performance versus category and competitors, and measurement and optimisation of the impact of category resets.

“In partnering with Acosta, we bolster the delivery of new data and insights to clients and customers with our ability to touch any store and any category at any time,” said Richard Schwartz, CEO of Pensa Systems. “We know that Acosta holds an exceptional reputation as a trusted partner to CPG brands and retailers, and we’re honoured to build upon that trust by delivering transformative value through transformative innovation.”