In store auditing software for field reps came on the market to bridge that gap and give managers a faster and more accurate view of their brands and product lines at the store level. But what are the criteria that should be used to evaluate not only the best solution for field reps but also for managers?
Every retail-centric business has to perform merchandising activities. From stores to manufacturers, distributors, and marketing agencies, companies in retail need to make sure that products are being distributed and displayed correctly. It generates huge amounts of data. This means that detecting threats and opportunities within the captured data becomes increasingly difficult as business grows, therefore mission-critical issues such as frequent out-of stocks or damaged shipments can easily be overlooked.
Merchandising activities are traditionally natural resource intensive, from the piles of paper necessary to perform numerous daily audits to the amount of fuel used by reps in their daily routes.
Having store audit report templates can greatly reduce the amount of time spent reporting. However, many retail audit apps available on the market do not offer the flexibility needed to fully customize templates, both for data collection and for report generation.
Retail-related activities generate a lot of information. However, reporting for retail audits and merchandising can be quite intimidating, and reading through sheets and sheets of data is hardly an effective way to pinpoint in-store issues that might be affecting retail sales. In that scenario, important issues such as frequent out-of-stocks can get lost within the large amount of information coming from different reps and locations.
Merchandising reports can seem complex to build but, with the right piece of software, merchandising and category managers can easily organize multiple store data in a way that will lead to the appropriate action by management.
By implementing an app for retail execution, managers will completely eliminate this lag time between retail data capture and reporting and even go beyond: businesses can exponentially increase the breadth of data it collects by developing in-depth forms and generate merchandising reports much more representative of their retail channel realities.
Retail execution apps have revolutionized the way store audits were performed with the virtual elimination of paper forms and transcription that came with the advent of data collection apps for smartphones and tablets.
Here’s our guide on simplifying planogram compliance checks with our merchandising software.
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