---
title: "Can Terminal Inspection Really Only Rely on Manual Labor?"
description: "Store visits, display inspections, competitor information collection, communication with store owners, and training salespeople are tasks that Xiao Qiang repeats every month. He is a supervisor for a leading snack food brand, responsible for over a hundred stores in East China. With more than 20 days of business trips each month, and calculating half an hour per store and 12 hours of work per day, Xiao Qiang can only visit 24 stores a day. As the company's business expands, his workload increases, and at over 30 years old, he feels overwhelmed. Wang Ke, a salesperson at a beverage company, faces similar challenges."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-08-19"
language: "en"
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markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/can-terminal-inspection-really-only-rely-on-manual-labor-e6926c8e.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PiNYwHs2Dv-HwJT798Hnhg"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E7%BB%88%E7%AB%AF%E6%A0%B8%E6%A3%80-%E7%9C%9F%E7%9A%84%E5%8F%AA%E8%83%BD%E9%9D%A0%E4%BA%BA%E5%B7%A5%E5%90%97-e6926c8e.md"
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---

# Can Terminal Inspection Really Only Rely on Manual Labor?

> Store visits, display inspections, competitor information collection, communication with store owners, and training salespeople are tasks that Xiao Qiang repeats every month. He is a supervisor for a leading snack food brand, responsible for over a hundred stores in East China. With more than 20 days of business trips each month, and calculating half an hour per store and 12 hours of work per day, Xiao Qiang can only visit 24 stores a day. As the company's business expands, his workload increases, and at over 30 years old, he feels overwhelmed. Wang Ke, a salesperson at a beverage company, faces similar challenges.

Store visits, display inspections, competitor information collection, communication with store owners, and training salespeople are tasks that Xiao Qiang repeats every month. He is a supervisor for a leading snack food brand, responsible for over a hundred stores in East China.
Every month, Xiao Qiang spends more than 20 days on business trips. Calculating half an hour per store and 12 hours of work per day, Xiao Qiang can only visit 24 stores a day. As the company's business expands, his workload increases, and at over 30 years old, he feels overwhelmed.
Wang Ke is a salesperson at a beverage company, responsible for 80 stores on his route. Checking shelf displays, restocking, organizing shelves, and bundling promotional items are his basic tasks. If there are few people around, Wang Ke might secretly reduce competitors' shelf space to expand his own product displays.
The company requires every salesperson to take photos and upload terminal display photos, and even record competitors' SKUs and shelf counts, so that the company can analyze product market share.
According to standard procedures, completing a store visit takes at least 20 minutes, and if chatting with the store owner, at least 30 minutes. With a daily visit target of 20 stores, it takes 10 hours. This is the daily routine of frontline salespeople.
**Their troubles may be yours too**
Low wages, boring work, and high pressure are the sentiments of frontline salespeople. For young people like Wang Ke, the company's promotion path is: salesperson - regional supervisor - city manager - headquarters. But few salespeople can persist to the second step. Of the five who came with Wang Ke, three have already left, and he doesn't know how long he can hold on.
Behind them, companies are facing greater challenges, which come from China's FMCG market that has entered stock competition.
Due to unbalanced regional economic development, consumption levels vary, so even with the rapid development of digital marketing today, terminal dominance remains the most important strategy for brand owners.
"Seize the terminal, occupy the shelf space" has become the basic slogan at FMCG companies' mobilization meetings, and the human wave tactic remains the common approach for brand owners. However, compared to a decade ago, companies are investing more and more in human resources.
To speed up distribution and increase sales, companies have set strict KPI assessments for salespeople. Under high pressure, some salespeople have begun to cheat. To complete visit quotas, some salespeople visit terminals superficially, some even locate at the door and upload a few random photos.
Backend inspection is time-consuming and laborious, frontend information collection accuracy is not high, and with channel sinking leading to store fragmentation, companies have no choice but to hire more salespeople to maintain terminals. Behind this is a game between cost and profit.
To reverse the decline, many brand owners are looking for methods. They pin their hopes on digital marketing service providers, hoping to use their technology to improve the accuracy of frontend business information collection and reduce the difficulty of backend data analysis.
**Product recognition models may become a standard business tool for brand owners**
With consumption upgrades and the continuous expansion of consumer demand, the FMCG industry launches tens of thousands of new products each year, all of which need to be promoted and sold through terminals. Facing hundreds of SKUs per store, salespeople need to count them during each visit. This consumes a lot of time and energy, especially during the distribution phase after new product launches, when salespeople need to deliver and display new product materials, such as posters, new product displays, and gift bundling.
So, will there be a tool that can reduce salespeople's workload while improving the accuracy of terminal inspection? New Distribution believes that with the gradual maturity and commercial application of artificial intelligence technology, digital and intelligent tools are likely to take on the important task of terminal inspection.
Terminal inspection personnel can take photos of displayed products, and through product recognition models, obtain the shelf count and display area of such products. When all terminal data is uploaded simultaneously, it can help brand owners more accurately analyze product market share and sales trends.
Product recognition models are a product's identity code, which can both monitor new product promotion progress and conduct market analysis for bestsellers. It can be said that product recognition models will become a standard business tool for brand owners' digital marketing in the future.
Of course, whether building product recognition models or using digital terminal inspection tools, brand owners need professional algorithm engineer teams and server resources for model training, which requires significant costs in both talent and technology. Some leading brands have relevant technical teams to operate, but for most FMCG brand owners, they do not have the accumulation of technology or talent resources.
**Stones from other mountains can polish jade**
Lack of accumulation does not mean it cannot be done. With the development of network technology over the past decade or so, and the popularization of social media and short video platforms such as web and mobile official websites, Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, brand owners can build their own promotional platforms to achieve more real-time and closer communication and interaction with consumers. We find that with advanced internet tools, brand owners can connect with consumers in a low-cost, high-efficiency manner.
Similarly, with the continuous development of technology, advanced internet tools will also meet brand owners' needs for product digitalization.
In the field of meeting brands' product digitalization needs, the EasyDL Retail version model training platform launched by Baidu Brain can serve as another dividend for brand owners in the AI era.
EasyDL Retail version, through open training, allows any brand owner, without any algorithm engineers or computing resources, to train a high-precision SKU recognition model by simply providing and labeling image data of the SKUs to be recognized.
EasyDL Retail version does not charge any fees during the training phase; only when it is actually integrated into business applications does it charge on demand. This helps brand owners start projects quickly and test the waters at zero cost. It can be said to maximize the digitalization process of brand owners while reducing trial-and-error costs.
Apart from cost factors, brand owners also value the operability of new technologies, after all, for FMCG brand owners, they need a system that is ready to use.
As an open SKU recognition model training platform, EasyDL Retail version allows brand owners or third-party service providers in the FMCG field to easily and conveniently calculate business functions they care about, such as distribution rate and shelf share, based on Baidu's model recognition information.
Finally, applicability is also a concern for brand owners or service providers, after all, terminal inspection is only one of their tasks, and they need comprehensive monitoring of product conditions at the terminal.
In addition to EasyDL Retail version, Baidu Brain also offers standard OCR models and the iOCR custom template recognition platform to meet the recognition needs of FMCG brand owners and distributors for various receipts, documents, price tags, posters, etc. In addition, face recognition and map technology can solve problems such as attendance check-in for field personnel and route planning for salesperson visits. It can be said to comprehensively cover brand owners' handling of terminal issues.
In the future, competition among FMCG brand owners will not only be in product strength and brand strength, but also in technological strength. Whether it is digital marketing tools or product recognition models, their emergence will help brand owners conduct more precise and deep distribution, increase product sales through low-cost operation models, and contribute to overall profit improvement. At the same time, with this system, salespeople's working hours can be reduced, and their work enthusiasm can be improved, providing technical support for companies to build professional sales teams.
Once the tip is adopted, a reward of 400-2000 yuan will be paid.


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