The retail industry has seen tremendous growth over the last few decades. Rapid changes in customer demands combined with technological advancements have increased competition in the market. Today, retailers are optimizing every opportunity possible, to create value for customers. Considering the limited amount of store space available, retail space planning is fundamental to the success of any brick-and-mortar store. This realization has prompted many retail to choose planograms for successful retail space management.

What are planograms?

Planograms are visual merchandising tools that assist retailers in creating detailed drawings of a store layout – including product, shelf and aisle. Planograms provide useful insights in understanding how and where to place the product for getting maximum customer attention. The primary objective of any planogram software is to ensure availability of the right product at the right place and time for maximized sales and revenue. Since the average attention span of a customer is merely 8 seconds, product visibility, assortment and presentation are key to motivate buyers. A well-designed planogram not only ensures better retail space planning, but also provides enhanced shopping experiences to customer thereby ensuring customer loyalty.

Major retail execution challenges faced by the industry today

1. Out of stocks: Finding an empty shelf can be the worst nightmare for customers, prompting them to switch stores. Out of stocks create an impression of unorganized stores that do not cater to customer needs. In most cases, out of stocks are results of untimely stock replenishments.

Nevertheless, such situations can be completely eliminated using a planogram. Planograms analyse past data to predict when a product would get exhausted so that stock replenishments can be done on time.

2. Getting more value from data: Customer data is vital for retailers in providing personalized shopping experiences to buyer. However, simply having large quantities of raw data is useless. The collected data should be processed using appropriate techniques, so as to make logical conclusions.

In order to overcome hurdles associated with value creation, retailers can use planograms. Planograms analyze data collected from multiple sources to predict variations in sales and profit of an individual product, brand or even a category. It can also give insights to retailers regarding areas that need improvement.

3. Unorganized stores: Again, messy stores can cause unpleasant shopping experience to customers. In an unorganized store,a retailer cannot decide where and how to position their products-thus causing limited product visibility to customers.

Planograms are a good choice in alleviating these challenges. For example, planograms can be used to arrange products based on category, sub-category or segment; position products according to a specific color scheme or showcase best-selling products at eye level- thereby creating visually appealing stores.

4. Excess inventory: Products that have not been sold or that exceed expected demand is called dead stock or excess inventory. Such stocks cause capital to be held up in them, leading to considerable loss in revenue. Decentralised buying method is one of the major causes of such an excess inventory.

Here retailers can use planograms for centralized assortment planning and buying. This allows them to have a single control point where all buying decisions are taken.

Retail planogramming with Nexgen POG

Nexgen POG is a powerful and cost effective visual merchandising tool that facilitates quick and effective planogramming. It is a robust cloud-based planogram software with multi-device and multi-browser compatibility .Nexgen POG is equipped with vast array of features like customisable templates, manual and automated modes, shelf compliance, online sharing– making it an ultimate choice for retailers globally. Nexgen POG’s affordable pricing and practical licensing models ensure full value for your money