Retail Execution and Shelf Audits Built for Ghana's FMCG Trade

Modern trade and traditional trade are tagged as separate outlet classes, each on its own audit brief. A provision shop or table-top stall gets a checklist built for frontage, poster survival and price adherence; a Melcom or Carrefour aisle gets a planogram and share-of-shelf check instead. Scores roll up by class, so a brand team can see general trade slipping even while a modern-trade account looks healthy.

A rep photographs the stall or shelf with GPS and a timestamp attached. The model reads sachets, PET bottles, cartons and pouches, counts facings against the brief, and flags a rival pack sitting where yours should be. It is built for stacked, informally arranged displays, so a dense provision-shop frontage or a busy stall at Kejetia reads as reliably as a supermarket bay.

L1 is the merchandiser's own check, logged at the point of the visit. L2 sits with a supervisor, triggered automatically when a score falls below the set line or by a routine sampling rule. L3 is a regional or brand-level spot-check across a sample of outlets in a territory. Each level is independent of the one before it, and a failed audit opens a corrective task with its own deadline rather than sitting as a number on a report.

Trade marketing sets the brief by outlet class and attaches it to the campaign window, whether that's a Christmas display drive, an Easter push or activity timed to a regional festival. Allocation by outlet is generated from the brief automatically, and reps capture a before-and-after photo pair validated by GPS at install. A live ROI view flags any campaign falling behind while there is still time to fix it in the field, not after the window closes.

Yes. The app is built offline-first, which matters on agricultural and northern beats where coverage genuinely thins. A rep working a kiosk cluster in the Upper East or a stall row where signal drops can still work through the full checklist, capture photos and record POSM status. Everything queues on the device and syncs once a connection returns, so a beat outside network range never turns into a missing visit.

Every checklist carries fields for competitor branding, price talkers, end-cap or gondola takeovers, cooler presence and any new launch spotted on the visit. The AI layer adds to that automatically by flagging a rival pack placed directly beside yours. That combined picture is what feeds a joint business planning conversation with a key distributor or a modern-trade buyer, and it shapes where the next trade scheme gets weighted.

An audit captures the FDA registration and batch number for the SKUs that carry expiry risk, and the platform checks each one against the batch master. Once stock at an outlet is closing in on its date, a flag goes up, and from there a brand team can arrange a clearance price or a batch swap before write-off is the only option left. Dairy, juice and bread lines get routed through this check first, since they carry the least runway.

A regional view shows compliance across, say, the Greater Accra and Ashanti belt against a thinner northern territory. A channel view separates provision shops, kiosks, container shops and market stalls from the modern-trade estate. A SKU view shows facing counts for a beverage, food, personal-care or home-care range. Every level drills down to the individual visit and the photo behind it, so a number on a dashboard is never the end of the trail.

It runs on the same cloud record as the SFA and DMS rather than sitting apart from them. Every audit is logged against the visit itself, which links forward to secondary sales through the key distributor's own selling team, so a brand can trace coverage from visit to audit to sale in one place. Where visit counts look healthy but audit counts lag, that gap surfaces on its own in the rep review, and 1Voice AI can answer a follow-up question in plain language rather than a report request.

A brand manager gets POSM compliance, facing trends by SKU, planogram breaches, cooler and fridge presence, competitor adjacency and a near-expiry heatmap. A trade-marketing lead follows campaign spend in GHS against install pace and ROI. Sales leadership gets a regional roll-up across the coverage footprint, from the dense southern belt to the sparser north, and 1Voice AI takes the one-off questions that would otherwise wait for the next report cycle.