Planogram: What It Is and How to Check It

What is a planogram

A planogram is the layout that shows where each product goes on a store shelf: which shelf, at what height, next to which other products and with how many facings. It is the map of the display. It is usually prepared by head office or the category management team, and each store puts it in place.

It keeps the display the same across every store in a chain, gives each product the space it earns based on what it sells, and helps customers find what they are looking for. It is also the basis for agreements with suppliers who pay for a specific position on the shelf.

What a planogram includes

• Position of each item: section, shelf and order.
• Facings: how many units of the product face the customer.
• Height: products at eye level are the ones seen most.
• Grouping by product family, brand or size.
• Capacity of each slot, which tells staff when to restock.

How stores check planogram compliance

A planogram only works if the store follows it, and day to day it easily drifts: restocking is rushed, customers move products, an empty slot gets filled with a different item, or a display change never gets applied.

The traditional way to check it is an in-store audit. Someone walks the aisles with the planogram on paper or a tablet and notes the differences. It is slow and only gives a snapshot of one moment.

The alternative is to work with images of the shelf, taken by staff or by fixed cameras. A computer vision model detects the products, their position and the empty slots, and compares them with the planogram. The differences become alerts for the store team.

An example

A chain changes the planogram for its dairy shelf to give more facings to a new yogurt. A week later, head office wants to know which stores have applied it. With manual audits, it has to wait for each supervisor's visit. With images of the shelf, it can see which stores still have the old display and where the new yogurt has already sold out.

Planograms and stockouts

The two go together. The planogram says what should be in each slot; an empty slot where there should be product is a stockout on the shelf. That is why planogram checks and stockout detection usually run on the same images.

Planograms in DPI's computer vision for retail

DPI's computer vision for retail solution includes planograms among its applications. It runs on the store's existing video surveillance cameras and processes images locally on an NVIDIA Jetson edge device, with no dependence on the cloud. It uses real-time object detection and tracking models and shows the results in dashboards with alerts, filters and reports.