Beyond Compliance: Transforming Retail Execution with In-Store Scene Understanding

Planogram compliance answers one question: was your plan followed? It cannot tell you what the category did that week, what your competitors put on shelf or why your volume moved.

Our new guide, Beyond Compliance, shows CPG commercial teams how in-store scene understanding (ISSU) reads the whole shelf. Your range, your competitors' range and the promotional material around both. It's free to download.

Compliance is the foundation, not the ceiling

Compliance still matters. You need to know your SKU-level availability, your facings and whether products sit in the right place at the right price. But high visibility of your own range was never the whole picture. Commercial teams want competitor activity in the same dataset, at the same cadence, so trade and pricing decisions hold up in the meeting.

ISSU combines SKU data and POS display data into one view of the scene. You see your own execution and your competitors' in the same pass, with share of shelf measured rather than estimated.

What you'll learn inside

How ISSU works and why it changes the commercial conversation, from reporting on what you intended to acting on what happened.

Share of shelf across the category. The four levers competitors use to grow their space: trade promotions, new product launches, marketing and negotiation. Every one of those conversations gets stronger with image-level proof of the shelf on the day.

POSM and POS displays. Why most POSM campaigns are planned on internal data alone and how scene understanding flags a poor-ROI campaign before the spend.

Every surface in the store. Warm shelf, cold vault, POS displays, racks and backroom stock, all scene-classified from the same set of photos into one governed dataset.

Shelf data in your data lake. Recognition results land natively in your Databricks lakehouse through Unity Catalog, joined to depletions, trade spend and supply data from the first image.

The blocker most teams overlook: catalogue management

Image recognition is only as good as the catalogue behind it. Onboarding SKUs and POSM still means bespoke photography, weeks of image collection and manual annotation. It does not scale and it never finishes, because the range keeps changing.

Online sources do not fill the gap. Public SKU libraries claim 95% coverage. Neurolabs research puts it at 60% at best and only 35–45% of products in UK stores have any online presence at all.

Hours, not weeks

The guide explains how ZIA Capture puts onboarding in the hands of the field reps who see the catalogue every day. Upload the artwork or use the app to build an accurate 3D model in minutes. Barcodes upload automatically. The full catalogue onboards in hours, with a recognition model ready to deploy inside a day.

Because a digital twin can exist before the product reaches the shelf, launches no longer wait on recognition. You can onboard a competitor's catalogue the same way, which is where the competitor insight comes from.

Built for commercial leaders

This guide is written for the people accountable for category performance: VP Sales, Directors of Trade, RGM and field operations leaders at CPG brands, plus the field marketing agencies and sales force automation partners who work with them.

Download the guide

Beyond Compliance is a 12-minute read on moving from planogram compliance to a full read of the shelf. Get your free copy and see what is actually happening in your stores: yours and everyone else's.