Key Takeaways
• Adherence to planograms helps stores optimize shelf space, improve the shopping experience, and boost profits.
• Communication gaps, inconsistent implementation, and the evolving retail landscape make planogram compliance difficult.
• Regular self-inspections and external audits using inspection apps like GoAudits can help tackle these challenges.
Planograms are the blueprints for retail success. They meticulously map out product placement to maximize sales and customer experience. Ensuring that stores adhere to these plans can be a constant battle.
Read on to understand the critical role of planogram compliance, as well as the challenges retailers face during implementation. Furthermore, learn powerful strategies to achieve 100% adherence: planogram inspections and retail audit software.
Planogram Compliance Meaning: What is Planogram Compliance?
Planogram compliance ensures that stores adhere to guidelines related to the strategic display of products. These guidelines are issued by the headquarters or the FMCG companies to improve product visibility and increase sales.
Store managers and visual merchandisers are responsible for monitoring planogram compliance; however, HQs and FMCG companies commission monthly or quarterly store audits by area managers and merchandising auditors respectively.
Why Planogram Compliance Matters for Retailers?
Besides creating a visually appealing product display, a strong planogram is an essential tool for enhancing retail operations, helping achieve several important goals:
- Enhanced Shopping Experience: With products arranged in a way that is logical and easy to navigate, it helps customers find exactly what they want.
- Increased Sales Opportunities: Effective product placement can encourage impulse buys or highlight promotional items, thus creating opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.
- Inventory Management: A planogram helps retailers maintain the right stock levels, avoiding the costs of overstocking or understocking.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Planograms are often developed based on detailed consumer data and shopping trends. Compliance with these layouts helps stores leverage analytical insights to increase purchase rates.
- Consistent Brand Image: A uniform look and feel can help reinforce the brand identity across all outlets.
Challenges of Achieving and Maintaining Planogram Compliance
Here are the challenges faced by retailers in ensuring planogram compliance in stores.
Busy Staff
Store staff often simultaneously juggle multiple tasks like stocking shelves, assisting customers, or processing returns, leaving little time for executing and maintaining product displays. This may lead to inaccurate product placement and a sub-optimal shopping experience.
Consistent Implementation in All Stores
Planogram designers don’t consider individual stores, nor do they always break down the implementation into actionable steps. Differences in store layouts, shelf configurations, and even staff skill sets can make it difficult to achieve a one-size-fits-all approach.
Communication Gap
Planogram compliance guidelines are drafted by HQs (or CPG companies) and sent to stores for implementation. In most cases, storefronts lack a robust workflow to raise the issues they encounter during implementation.
Staff Accountability
Planogram development is a top-down approach, where staff isn’t involved directly. This can lead to a mentality of “just following orders” rather than actively ensuring strict adherence.
Dynamic Retail Environment
New product launches, promotional offers, seasonal trends, etc. – the retail environment is forever evolving. Thus, planograms must be updated to keep pace, or they can quickly become outdated.
However, it takes time to revise planograms, roll them out, and ensure compliance, which can cause delays and lead to inefficiencies, missed sales opportunities, and a cluttered shopping experience.
How Do Planogram Inspection and Merchandising Audits Can Help?
Also termed planogram testing, a planogram inspection involves verifying if the product displays adhere to the guidelines. A merchandising audit assesses the overall effectiveness of the product presentation, including planograms.
Importance of Planogram Inspection
Regular planogram audits ensure shelves are stocked according to a designed layout, maximizing product visibility and enhancing customer experience. This translates to increased sales and prevents lost opportunities from out-of-stocks.
Planogram audits also identify deviations, allowing quick corrective actions and maintaining a consistent shopping experience.
👉 Useful Resource: Free Planogram Inspection Checklists
Here are the checklists to effectively inspect planogram implementation in stores:
→ Product Inspection Checklist
→ Merchandising Audit Checklist
→ Visual Merchandising Checklist
Planogram Inspection App: Unlock 100% Planogram Compliance
Maintaining planogram compliance has relied on manual inspections and paper checklists. This approach can be inefficient, time-consuming, and leads to a trail of paperwork.
Planogram inspection apps like GoAudits streamline the inspection process and empower retailers to achieve consistent retail execution.
Here are the benefits of using a planogram auditor app:
Standardized Planogram Implementation
The best way to achieve standard planogram implementation is to introduce the practice of self-inspections with digital self-audit checklists.
Digital store checklists equip stores with clear, actionable steps, reducing subjectivity and increasing consistency. Also, you can easily update digital checklists to accommodate seasonal trends.
With the GoAudits retail audit app, you can build checklists from scratch and share them with stores. You can also attach planogram images, comments, next steps to address discrepancies or exceptions, etc.
The staff can access these checklists through the GoAudits mobile app, which also supports offline inspections, facilitating audits even for store areas with low connectivity.
HQ teams can schedule self-audits and assess the results to ensure consistent planogram implementation.
Visual Confirmation
This is one of the most effective ways of ensuring planogram compliance. Visuals confirm that all changes were made and the products were displayed as per the guidelines. The visuals also help HQ teams identify discrepancies in the product displays.
In most cases, store managers (or auditors) take photos and share them with stakeholders via email or a messaging app. However, this isn’t efficient.
With the GoAudits mobile app, staff can take photos during the audit (or self-audit), which is included in the detailed audit report. Besides photos, the report has audit time, store location, auditor details, and historical corrective action data. This helps HQ teams estimate the time taken for implementation.
Efficient Planogram Audits
In the case of big retail chains, scheduling audits regularly can be a challenge. If not coordinated properly, planogram inspections hamper the shopping experience.
Manual store inspections can add to these challenges. They are prone to human error because they require auditors to spend several hours assessing inspection data and creating reports.
With digital inspection software like GoAudits, you can perform faster audits without paperwork. Retailers can schedule inspections well in advance, ensuring regular inspections for each store.
You can equip auditors with digital store checklists to inspect product placements and layouts. For reference, you can attach photos of what is expected from the stores. Auditors can take annotated photos to point out errors and assign corrective measures.
After completing the inspection, they can generate a report that can be instantly shared with stakeholders, saving thousands of hours spent doing the task manually.
2-Way Communication
Stores often lack a defined workflow to flag the issues they face while implementing the planogram guidelines.
With a digital auditor tool like GoAudits, retailers can define workflow i.e., who needs to get notified and address problems encountered by the storefront. The stores can take photos of the issues, add comments or notes, and send reports to the HQ, who can suggest measures to ensure planogram compliance.
Actionable Reporting
With GoAudits, stores or auditors can generate detailed planogram inspection reports in standardized formats. These reports include a graphical representation of the compliance results, photos of non-conformances, notes, comments, historical audit data, audit time, date, store location, etc.
Based on the report, HQ teams (or CPG companies) can suggest modifications to the shelf layout and product display. They can monitor the status of the modification through the inspection dashboard.
👉 Did You Know?
Goodwill saves at least 20 hours a week in writing action plans with GoAudits. This represents an estimated savings of $20,000 each year.
» Get Started: Book a demo or start a 14-day free trial to explore GoAudits.
Data-Driven Decision Making
A planogram inspection app like GoAudits presents all the audit data on one platform. Retailers can identify trends in compliance, assess the performance of individual stores (or store departments), and pinpoint areas of modifications.
GoAudits analytics dashboard also allows you to experiment with your planogram designs. For example, you can test different designs in different stores and compare their audit scores to assess which design performed better.
Many top businesses have improved their execution consistency and achieved high retail standards by adopting GoAudits.
» Capterra Reviews: With a rating of 4.7 stars, GoAudits is trusted by some of the biggest names in the industry.