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Retail Audit Software: Automating Planogram Compliance Checks


What Is a Planogram?
Planograms are visual representations of a store's products or services that are developed and implemented by retailers to ensure that their products are in the right place, at the right price, with consistent branding.

Companies put much effort and spend money to negotiate the best shelf placement and promotion for their products. But any marketing strategy can break down in practice with multiple locations to monitor and significant amount of data to be analyzed.

How to Improve Planogram Checks Efficiency?

Today you can easily improve your planogram implementation using a retail audit software solution for tablets and smartphones. By leveraging personal mobile devices and the cloud mobile technology for retail audits performance a company can significantly improve store planogram compliance herewith reducing operational costs. So let’s compare two ways of planogram checks performance to identify the key benefits of retail audit software.

Key Steps of Traditional Planogram Compliance Audits

  • Performing visual planogram compliance check – take a photo of the shelf and make note, if necessary, in the paper-based report form. The photo should be later somehow transferred to the corporate database and assigned to the information about the audit.
  • Evaluating the quantitative parameters of the layout – manually count the number of facings, find missing products and measure shelf share. All the information is recorded manually and therefore an average planogram compliance check takes 30 – 60 minutes.
  • Reporting the results to the management – go to the office to transfer paper forms or start your computer to manually enter the information one more time and send it to the office.
  • Analyzing compliance checks performance – field team managers have to look through big amounts of data to make sure that all the checks were performed properly or even manually transfer data from paper reports to corporate database by themselves. As they become overwhelmed with more and more data workflow they simple don’t have time and enthusiasm to analyze trends to make strategic decisions.

Performing Planogram Compliance Audit Using Retail Audit Software

  • Performing visual planogram compliance check – make a photo to your tablet or a smartphone using built-in photo report. All the photos taken during an audit are GPS-confirmed and time-stamped and are instantly synced with the corporate database.
  • Evaluating the quantitative parameters of the layout – perform all the tasks using your tablet or a smartphone. All the data entry is completely automated (including numbers, text notes, photos, electronic signature, multiple choice of answers) that allows reducing compliance check time at least by 50%.
  • Reporting the results to the management – all the data collected at stores during planograms checks is instantly transferred to corporate database. Field teams managers can evaluate field activities and progress in tasks performance in real time and field reps have no need to visit the office to report results.
  • Analyzing compliance checks performance – all the data collected in stores is instantly available for analysis or integration with a corporate back-end system. Use powerful filters to get the exact information you need at the moment and export the results to the corporate database.

Now we can see that automated planogram compliance checks can significantly improve a company’s bottom-line due to a more effective use of field reps’ and field teams managers’ time. Besides, automated data entry reduces the number of errors and real-time data synchronization provides thousands of locations covered at ease.



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