Randstad manages point-of-sale execution for brands across Spain, putting more than 3,000 people into stores every day and making over 2,000 visits, across sectors from technology and beauty to pharmacy. Too much of that time was going on manual reporting. Working with Neurolabs over the past three years, Randstad turned the store visit into a single photo, cutting audit time 8x and giving its people back the time that actually drives sales.

The challenge: time spent reporting, not selling

Field execution lives or dies on time. Randstad’s teams were spending a large share of every visit collecting information by hand, time that could go into selling, merchandising and building the relationship in store. Rafael López, Director of Field Services at Randstad, set two goals for the technology: efficiency, so staff could redirect time to higher-value work, and control, so the data coming back was reliable enough to make Randstad and its clients genuinely data-driven. In a channel that moves as fast as retail, slow manual reporting held both back.
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We spend a lot of time collecting information and we understood this process could be optimised with image recognition.
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‍Rafael López, Director of Field Services, Randstad

The solution: image recognition built for scale

Randstad chose Neurolabs for two reasons: real experience deploying image recognition in retail and how quickly the team grasped Randstad’s business. A rep now photographs the shelf and the technology reads it, capturing prices, promotions and product availability from a single image. Two things make it work at Randstad’s scale. Products are modelled from 3D digital twins rather than banks of real photos, so catalogues are built and expanded fast. The Capture app guides staff to take a consistent photo by distance and angle, with stitching to capture a full shelf in one pass and because Neurolabs keeps adding products and features as Randstad needs them, new requirements move from idea to in-store quickly.

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In retail, solutions can’t wait days. With Neurolabs we found a partner that supports us very quickly and not only supports us but brings us their knowledge. We call it technology with purpose.

Rafael López, Director of Field Services, Randstad

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The results: efficiency and control

The gains show up on both sides of the visit. Audits run 8x faster and recognition accuracy was above 90% from day one, passing 95% within a short time. Reporting time has dropped by more than 20%, time Randstad’s teams now spend selling, negotiating secondary space and serving the client. A single photo now captures what used to take six or seven minutes of manual reporting and cleaner data reaches clients faster. Randstad can also see across its whole operation: the 3,000+ people it deploys, the 2,000+ daily visits and the execution behind every one.

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With audits we’ve gained 8x faster efficiency thanks to image recognition. From day one we had accuracy above 90% and in very little time we passed 95%.

‍With a single photo the technology captures a lot of data: prices, promotions, product presence. It means less time reporting and more time on activity inside the store.

Marcos Martínez, Business Analytics lead, Randstad

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Looking ahead: from standardised visits to customised execution

For Randstad, image recognition has moved from a useful tool to the backbone of how it executes. The next step is specialisation by store type, tailoring execution to the modern channel, pharmacy or hypermarket and using the data it now captures to move from standardised visits to highly customised ones built around each client’s objective. Spain is the group’s technology reference point and Randstad is working with Neurolabs to bring the same quality of execution to other countries.
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We’re moving away from standardised visits towards highly customised visits, based on the objective of the day, the week and the month that our clients require.

Rafael López, Director of Field Services, Randstad

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Running field execution at scale? See how image recognition turns every store visit into reliable data. Talk to our team.