Losing money on your retail shop floor
June 16th, 2021
Are you still doing these 7 profit-killing mistakes?
Operating in the retail business has never been easy.As a Category Manager, you need to continuously monitor new product developments, filter them through fast-changing market trends and take decisions that will affect the revenues of your enterprise.Being a Space Manager, you have it no easier. Joggling through the unique dimensions of hundreds of retail store spaces and the product-specific promotional directions, you must develop and frequently review space utilization plans and guidelines, to guarantee the realization of marketing objectives and a captivating customer experience.Furthermore, if you are in a Retail Operations Director position, you hold the responsibility for profitable implementation of your enterprise’s retail strategies, as well as the optimization of operational processes and budget spending to hit your crucial KPIs.Complicated tasks, fast-changing business conditions, tough competition, and decisions of high impact. No wonder you work long hours, usually stressed to the limit, to effectively manage all these processes, people communications, and customers’ expectations.However, chances are that you are missing out on productivity opportunities, that could make your life much easier. As we found out from working with our clients, even in today’s hi-tech, IoT-enabled retail environment, 90% of the companies keep doing at least one of the following mistakes that spread people thin and drop the sales potential of their retail stores. Do you see anything familiar?
- Ineffective promotional campaigns:
No matter how diligent your planning processes and in-store display guidelines are, it is almost certain that your strategies will not be implemented as planned. Could there be any way to secure that your future planograms are fully executed, while saving time on endless and fruitless communications?
- High-cost compliance audits:
To keep control of your planograms’ executions, you insist on monitoring each implementation with in-store visits of well-trained personnel. Have you ever thought that it could be possible to verify high levels of compliance, holding everyone involved on the same page, without the need to spend valuable resources, such as highly skilled people’s time and transport expenses?
- Taking important decisions based on poor information:
Disregarding your organization collecting insufficient data on sales volumes, promotions effectiveness, and customer satisfaction, or just failing to correlate a great number of data available in endless spreadsheets, you could be missing out on valuable information. Incomplete data loops and sloppy feedback analysis almost certainly keep the efficiency of your organization low. How much would it help you to take better, low-risk decisions, if you could collect data all along with the products and customer journey paths, store them in a secure location to be automatically analyzed by cutting-edge software and have them presented with best practices and future action suggestions?
- Untimely shelve replenishment:
Empty shelves and shortage of products are significant barriers to having a memorable in-store shopping experience. But most of all, they limit your sales potential per display position. How great would it be if your e-labels were directly connected to your inventory management system, allowed for automatic search for available stock or instructed the replacement of unavailable product codes with the first alternative to be promoted, according to the Category Manager’s suggestions?
- Inability to follow market trends:
As more and more products are launched every day, keeping up with market’s expectations for immediate product in-store availability is a tedious task and puts your customers’ loyalty in jeopardy. Assortment needs to be updated more frequently than ever and new store plans should be developed and executed fast, to prevent them from looking elsewhere. Could there be a way to quickly refresh product lists and seamlessly implement new planograms, to not only retain your customers, but also win new ones from your competition?
- Applying the same strategy to all retail stores:
To save time and money, many companies come with a single plan and ask for it to be quickly implemented in all stores. Nevertheless, not taking into consideration the unique characteristics of each shop floor, geographical region, demographics, and customer preferences, results in poor space management and limits the sales potential of most stores. Can you imagine how impactful it would be for your retail business future, if you could combine both fast planogram adaptation and store-specific realization, to maximize customer satisfaction?
- Endless and ineffective communication between stores & headquarters:
Somewhere between PDF floorplans, planograms sent via email, and usage of distributed data systems, critical information and time is lost. Would it not be much more productive to have all plans, actions, tasks allocated, and feedback recorded in a single, collaborative platform? Maybe you have been disappointed with partial, difficult-to-use solutions and believe that some of the above performance limiting factors are impossible to deal with in a simple, scalable, and reliable way. However, your reality could be a lot different.
Take for example Mr. Papidis, Dixons South-East Europe’s CTO, who has supervised the problem-free implementation of Yodiwo’s plano360 AI-powered software solution – an industry-specific Retail Category & Space Management tool – in 85 stores.
After having monitored the performance of the cloud-based platform for a long time, his conclusions leave little in question:
“Having all the needed data from each store regarding stock management, products placements, special offers placements and monitoring, heat-maps etc. in one place and with a process that ensures accuracy and validity without burning valuable store staff time, the solution has become a valuable enabler of new unique capabilities.
We managed to maximize the effectiveness of each store and optimize each furniture space and shelf, and at the same time, control and visualize everything.”
So, if your business could be benefited from a single platform that will provide:
• Reliable data collection and analysis, to reduce the risk of your business decisions
• Increase of individual, retail store sales
• Perfect implementation of retail store planograms
• Space use optimization, via the collection and analysis of space occupancy data (heat maps)
• Time and cost-effective, remote planogram compliance audit
• Predictive data analysis between different ERP systems
• Enterprise- and store-specific implementation
• A consistent in-store shopping experience that will increase your customers’ loyalty
• Decrease of the internal (stores to HQ) complains
• Time-saving from a more effective communication
If you’d like to discover how your team can benefit from Plano360, the AI-powered Category & Space management solution, you can schedule a call with us here