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Sujit Das Munshi, company executive director, retail measurement services, South Asia, said that the move is in line with equipping its market research field force with Compaq's hand held terminals.
From next month, the 750-odd market research field force of the agency, who visit 400 cities and 1,100 villages and cover 55,000 stock keeping units at any point of time, will have less paper work to do.
They will have to simply enter their retail audits into their IPAQ 2110 hand held device and then send it through a computer terminal to the head office.
The agency claims to have invested more than Rs 100 million (Rs 10 crore) in new technology that will cut down sales reporting mechanism from 16 days to 7-8 days.
As a result, companies subscribing to the retail sales audits from the agency will be able to get their previous month's sales performance indicators by the first week of the new month.
"It's the single largest technological investment since the inception of market research in India in 1961," said Partha Rakshit, ACNielsen ORG-MARG managing director, South Asia.
Munshi adds that the HHTs with built-in error checking mechanisms offer better quality data along with the promise of speed.
Apart from the product off-take from shop shelves that were captured in the earlier pencil-and-notebook mechanism the new retail data measurement will also be able to capture the frequency, quantum and incidence of purchase.
The company could also look at increasing the frequency of retail sales data to generating fortnightly sales reports. It currently looks at only monthly sales data.
Munshi said that while this option was being explored by companies for tracking new product launches and festival sales data, companies preferred a monthly report as increasing frequency would also increase costs by around 40 per cent.
