The Everseen technology company, specialized in Deep Learning and Machine Vision, founded in 2008 by the Irish entrepreneur Alan O’Herlihy (photo), is working with five of the top 10 international retailers to suppress the losses of 40 billion dollars registered by the merchants at the points of sale.
The Everseen experienced management team, with offices both in Ireland (Blackpool) and in Romania (R & D department in Timişoara), represents a mix of technology and retail. Besides the know-how efficiency and the business profitability of these areas, the company benefits from expertise in artificial intelligence and machine vision technology, thanks to the scientists, most Romanian, which are a part of the management team. Among them are Dr. Bogdan Ciubotaru (Chief Technology Officer), Prof. Vasile Gui (Chief Research Officer), Dr. Cosmin Cernazeanu (Artificial Intelligence Lead), Dr. Ciprian David (Lead Algorithm Architect), Ovidiu Parvu (Research Design Lead ) and Prof. Dan Pescaru (Director of Research and Development), among many others.
The research center for the artificial intelligence systems and computer vision in Timisoara has currently 30 employees, and its founder and the majority shareholder Alan O’Herlihy plans to double this number over the next 12 months.”The funding that I have recently achieved from the capital investor with a turnover of billions of dollars MARCOL Group allows us to expand and develop our team. The Romanians are well known in the international community IT for their skills, their knowledge of the latest technology and creativity, which is one of the main reasons why we have established one of our offices in Timisoara six years ago. Today, we look for more specialists in technology and we are ready to provide a conductive environment for the professional and personal development” , said Alan O’Herlihy.
Combating losses at the points of sale
One of the main challenges that the company has undertaken is suppressing the recorded losses at the points of sale of the international retail industry. Everseen is using video analysis and artificial intelligence to reduce by 90% the omissions that occur at the point of the sale scanning. The amount of these losses is 40 billion dollars annually, according to the Centre for Retail Research.
“The retailers are facing with losses at the selling points of 40 billion dollars annually. These, caused by the unscanned products, have not only impact on the profit but also create problems in the supply chain, leading to the depletion of the stock. The omissions involved in the scanning process can be intentional or not and can be generated by customers, employees by operational errors or failure to the operational flow’ , said Professor Joshua Bamfield from the Centre for Retail Research. “Now, the retailers are suffering huge losses via POS and most likely, they are not realizing what is happening, how they can fight and how serious is this problem”.
Preventive measures
“The most retailers simply do not know where these losses come from. Therefore, they are acting blindly – trying to prevent the unwittingly losses. Understanding how these losses happen and how they can prevent them, the retailers could increase their profits by 5 to 15%” , explains O’Herlihy.
So, the company is resorting to the artificial intelligence, Computer Vision and Big Data of the latest generation, to detect all the types of illicit activities at the point of sale. The closed TV circuit and the data streams at the point of sale are loaded into the electronic data collection, which has dedicated incorporated technology. The electronic point of sale is continuously connected to a surveillance system that is strategically placed to monitor the activity of the entire selling point and to detect the potential operational irregularities. The Everseen solution has a single data collection unit connected to the surveillance system, the point of sale, Internet, thus enabling the company to precisely identify when, where and why a particular activity occurred. A video of the incident can be transmitted in real-time to the company employees.
