It is vital for retailers to ensure that the customer can always find the desired product on the shelf. Therefore, merchants must ensure that they can deliver this product quickly and correctly.
To do this, they use a planogram, which can both facilitate and complicate the exhibitor’s work. If the planogram is poorly drawn and the design does not correspond to it, this can mean losses for retail operators.
Mike Savitsky, technical lead for merchandising automation solutions at IBA Groupexplores how modern technologies are changing the way planograms are made and how this can benefit European manufacturers and retailers.
Obsolete methods: Microsoft Excel or Microsoft PowerPoint
Planograms are usually prepared using MS Power Point and MS Excel software and printed. Often these are ordinary tables with the names of products inscribed in the cells.
These planograms barely incorporate the features of commercial equipment and the products can be easily confused as they often differ in only one detail. For example, the same mineral water can be sold in 1.5-liter and 2-liter bottles, and cottage cheese of the same brand can have 1% and 5% fat.
The products can be confused not only by the shopkeepers, but also by the managers who then check the design from the photos. If one employee mixes up the numbers in the cells, the other can just as easily mix them up.
As a result, the work looks good on paper, but in reality, the buyer fails to find the desired product on the shelf and leaves the store without buying. And this translates into losses.
New technologies for retail: planogram in a minute with Plano Creator
To meet this challenge, the Plano Creator module was developed, which is included in the Goods Checker system.
merchandise checker is an ecosystem designed to automate marketing processes. The solution helps control whether products are displayed correctly, plan delivery logistics and deliver products to the point of sale on time. Performance results are stored in the database for later analysis.
With this solution, companies can organize merchandising correctly and increase sales. Managers, in turn, do not need to manually classify photos; they can spend more time on analytics, and merchants can immediately identify which products are misplaced.
Plano Creator is a constructor module intended to create electronic planograms. With this module, a manager can create a planogram in just a couple of minutes incorporating several hundred items with photos, providing a realistic presentation of business assets and equipment.
Advantages of the plan creator
Benefits:
- Planograms are created faster than with Excel or PowerPoint.
- Convenient approach to handling planograms with a large number of outlets and equipment types.
- Practical category tree even with more than 4,000 articles.
- Friendly interface to quickly add new items and equipment.
- Checking the correctness of the planogram (products in the air, products crossing the shelf, overlapping products, a wide product on a small one).
- Planogram view feature in the mobile app.
What is needed:
- System purchase costs.
- Employee training in the use of the new tool.
In Plano Creator, managers use drag and drop to create planograms that can be saved in MS Excel and PDF formats. Planograms with 100 SKUs can be created in a minute.
grid structure
One of the planogram options in Plano Creator is the grid planogram. It can be used for products of the same size, such as chocolates or tobacco products.
To create a planogram, you can select an entire brand, a sub-brand, or an individual SKU.
The planogram shows the number of SKUs that need to be placed on a shelf.
With this system, it is possible to display not only the final SKUs, but also the entire sub-brand. This is useful when a product has not arrived at the store. In this case, the merchant sees that the space is available for the product.
rack structure
The grid structure cannot be used for all purposes; rather it is suitable for a very limited range of products. Most of the time, manufacturers and distributors have a wide range of products, which in 99% of cases have different sizes.
That’s why Plano Creator also has a shelf structure. The rack structure allows you to customize the dimensions of the equipment, the number of racks, their sizes, etc.
When preparing a planogram, the dimensions of each SKU are immediately visible and after dragging it to the equipment, the remaining space to the end of the shelf is calculated. This helps to check rack occupancy.
The shelf structure helps to create individual planograms, for example, for each retail chain. After all, the demand is different in various places, which means that the presentation of the products on the shelves must be adapted to the demand. Furthermore, this approach streamlines the distribution of goods through retail chains.
Plano creator increases profits
Plan Creator is a simple tool to speed up the creation of planograms and simplify their updating. It also helps managers and executives to get aggregated and updated data from stores on time.
This ensures that managers can set realistic KPIs for merchandisers and evaluate employees fairly, while managers can increase the percentage of design compliance with planograms and track reasons why planograms are not being observed: missing of stocks, equipment failures, etc.
According to the InStore Implementation Network, full compliance with planograms results in 7.8% sales growth.
When the merchandising process becomes transparent to all participants and accurate aggregated data enters the company’s information system, the planogram compliance rate increases, which means sales and profits grow.
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