As the retail industry continues to evolve and become more complex, supply chain management has become a critical factor in the success of any retail business. The use of retail supply chain software has become increasingly important. It is vital in managing the various moving parts of the supply chain, from sourcing and manufacturing to distribution and inventory management.

 

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore what retail supply chain software is and why it’s important. Additionally, we will discuss the key features you should look for when selecting a solution for your business. We’ll also provide tips for implementation and adoption.

 

What is Retail Supply Chain Software?

Retail supply chain software is a type of software that helps retailers manage and optimize their supply chain operations. It provides tools and features that enable businesses to streamline various processes. This includes sourcing and manufacturing to distribution and inventory management.

 

Why is Retail Supply Chain Software Important?

In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive retail industry, supply chain management has become a critical factor in the success of any business. Retail supply chain software helps businesses stay on top of their operations. This is by providing real-time visibility into inventory levels, order status, and other critical metrics. This enables businesses to make informed decisions, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

 

Key Features of Retail Supply Chain Software

When evaluating, there are several key features to look for. Here are some of the most important ones:

 

Demand Forecasting and Planning

Demand forecasting and planning is the process of predicting future demand for a product or service. This allows for planning production and inventory accordingly. Retail supply chain software should provide tools and features that enable businesses to accurately forecast demand and plan production and inventory levels to meet that demand.

 

Order Management

Order management involves the process of receiving, processing, and fulfilling customer orders. The software should provide tools and features that enable businesses to manage customer orders efficiently and effectively.

Inventory Management

Inventory management involves the process of managing inventory levels and ensuring that the right products are available at the right time. The software should provide tools and features that enable businesses to manage inventory levels, track inventory movements, and optimize inventory levels to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

 

Warehouse Management

Warehouse management involves the process of managing the movement and storage of inventory in a warehouse or distribution center. The software should provide tools and features that enable businesses to manage warehouse operations efficiently and effectively.

 

Transportation Management

Transportation management involves the process of managing the movement of goods from one location to another. The software should provide tools and features that enable businesses to manage transportation operations, including carrier selection, routing, and tracking.

 

Supplier Management

Supplier management involves the process of managing relationships with suppliers and ensuring that they meet the business’s requirements for quality, delivery, and cost. The software should provide tools and features that enable businesses to manage supplier relationships, track supplier performance, and optimize supplier selection.

 

Analytics and Reporting

Analytics and reporting involve the process of analyzing data to identify trends, patterns, and insights that can be used to improve supply chain operations. The software should provide tools and features that enable businesses to collect, analyze, and report on data from across the supply chain, including inventory levels, order status, and transportation performance.

 

Tips for Implementing Retail Supply Chain Software

Implementing can be a complex and challenging process. Here are some tips for making the process as smooth and successful as possible:

 

Assess Your Business Needs

Before selecting a retail supply chain software solution, it’s important to assess your business needs and identify the features and functionality that are most important to your operations.

 

Choose the Right Software Provider

Choosing the right software provider is critical to the success of your implementation. Look for a provider with a track record of successful implementations and a strong commitment to customer support.

 

Train Your Employees

Training your employees is essential to ensuring that they can effectively use the new software. Make sure to provide comprehensive training and ongoing support.

Integrate Your Systems

Integrating your new retail supply chain software with your existing systems and processes is critical to achieving maximum benefit from the solution. Work closely with your software provider to ensure a smooth integration.

 

Monitor and Evaluate Performance

After implementation, it’s important to monitor and evaluate the performance of your new system to ensure that it’s delivering the expected benefits. Continuously evaluate and optimize your operations to achieve maximum efficiency and cost savings.

 

Conclusion

Retail supply chain software has become a critical tool for businesses looking to streamline their operations and achieve maximum efficiency and cost savings. By selecting the right software solution and implementing it effectively, retailers can gain real-time visibility into their supply chain operations, optimize inventory levels, and improve order fulfillment. Discover how OptimMerchandising App can be very beneficial for your retail business.

Coming up with the best retail execution plans should be one of the main priorities for all Australian brands that work with retail stores.

Placing an emphasis on great retail execution is important as it helps make the products of certain brands stand out over their competitors on the shelves.

Retail execution in Australia

Retail execution is the term used to describe all of the activities that brands perform at point of sales which are aimed at increasing purchases and conversions.

Having a successful retail execution strategy will have a significant contribution to the success of your retail sales which you will need since you will be competing with more than 140,000 retail businesses in Australia.

When planning out your retail execution, you are making sure that you are placing the right product on the right shelf at the right time, for the convenience of your customers.

Some activities that cover retail execution include order replenishment, shelf merchandising, trade promotions, store audits, and more.

You will be able to maximize your productivity when doing these activities when you use a merchandising app especially when you have to address potential problems like losing a significant amount of sales due to stockout issues.

What are merchandising apps?

A merchandising app is a software that specializes in retail and merchandising activities. It allows merchandisers, brands, and field reps to perform retail inspections and audits for visual merchandising in a remote manner through a smartphone or tablet.

These apps are made to simplify and optimize task management, especially those that are crucial to your retail execution plans.

Along with this, they can create better communication for field reps, and improve the rate of reporting and transparency.

Merchandising apps also help brands recognize how impactful their retail decisions are so that they can plan out and optimize better retail execution plans in the future.

Challenges Faced By Australian Brands Which Can Be Addressed With Great Retail Execution

Here are the 2 main reasons why it is important for Australian brands to have great retail execution plans:

1. Great retail execution can help with solidifying their brand in Australian retail stores.

Australian brands should see retail stores as another additional opportunity to tell their story to their customers and provide them with a positive experience with their brand and their products.

Having a great retail execution strategy will help push consumers to react positively when they see their products in a store.

Luckily for these Australian brands, there are merchandising software and apps that have a lot of features to aid their field reps in checking all the retail shelves and making sure that their retail execution is going well in all stores.

Checking the retail execution in all of your different store locations is vital for your business as it gives you a better idea of your performance in both urban areas like Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth and the smaller cities as well.

Australia offers unique challenges because of how large the country’s area is. There are a lot of cities and areas for you to cover in Australia and you will need to keep track of each store and how often you will need to visit it. However, this process can be a lot easier when using a merchandising app which can organise all of your store visits.

Tasks like monitoring store shelves in real-time with photos, taking stock of merchandise, and comparing shelves to planograms are not just important for tracking your inventory, but they also help brands check if their retail execution is being followed.

The displays and promotions help convey the brand image of Australian brands, so it is important that these are perfectly executed inside stores.

Mobile merchandising apps can guide field reps to optimize their work so that the retail execution goals of brands can be achieved in each retail store.

2. Australian brands can gain actionable sales insights with great retail execution.

All of the merchandising activities that come from the retail execution plans of Australian brands will provide them with up to date reporting on the status of some of the most important factors to note.

These factors include the status of their product’s inventory, information about the competitive landscape, sell-through data, and a lot more.

This data is crucial as it can provide these brands with tangible and actionable insights which will help them improve upon their previous retail execution strategy so that they can have more successful strategies in the future.

 

 

7 Ways Merchandising Apps Help Australian Brands Ace Their Retail Execution

1. Merchandising apps provide field reps with detailed work instructions and checklists.

With merchandising apps, brands can set regular visit schedules, track executions, and optimise their workforce and field reps when they are doing on-ground work.

These schedules can contain detailed work instructions which will inform reps on what activities need to be done for each store. Whether your stores are in Perth, Melbourne, or Sydney, merchandising apps help you cover all of  your store locations.

With these apps, it can be a lot easier to update, change, or remove work instructions and instantly distribute them to all of the reps in the field.

These instructions also come with checklists for all of their tasks which they can tick off once they have completed them.

2. You will expand your coverage analysis with merchandising apps.

When field reps are using these merchandising apps for their on-ground work, you are able to track and analyse much more than the data that is being reported.

This is because merchandising apps can also collect information like time and locations along with what stores are getting visits, how long the visits take, and what activities are being done in the store.

All of this can help provide Australian brands with valuable insights on how well their outlets are being covered, and can enable them to make informed decisions on how to realign and assign tasks to reps in the field.

3. Field reps can track how well your retail execution is in-store through photos which can be sent with merchandising apps.

The best merchandising apps will include a built-in camera function which allows field reps to take photos of the shelves and stocks within the app interface. The app can also have a photo gallery which saves and lets reps view all of the photos that have been taken.

Field reps should leverage this resource as this can give brands real time updates on what their retail execution currently looks like and how many products are on the shelves.

4. Australian brands can have better communication with their field reps through these apps.

Since field reps will use smartphones or tablets to access merchandising apps, these will already be an effective way of communicating between field reps and management.

The best merchandising apps are able to integrate all the important communication channels into their app so that it will be the only application that field reps will use for all types of communication.

This can include direct messaging, broadcast messaging, and important company-wide announcements that will keep reps informed of policies and tasks.

5. It is easier to take and request stocks to avoid out of stock problems with merchandising apps.

Merchandising apps contain a clean and user-friendly interface which make it easier for field reps to take inventory of stocks.

They can also easily create stock requests by ordering through the app in real time which will minimise lost sales because of stockout problems. Your retail execution plan will continue to be successful as long as you will have the right amount of stock on shelves.

6. Merchandising apps provide brands an easy way to track their sales performance.

Great merchandising apps provide field reps and brands with a sales transaction dashboard. This dashboard helps brands and reps with tracking their sales performance.

The sales transaction dashboard can easily measure the daily or monthly sales performance of a brand and can also record new transactions at the point of sale.

7. Merchandising apps can generate reports to easily view important data.

Australian brands will also have access to reports and analytics with merchandising apps. These can help them make better decisions and retail execution strategies with the data that they have gathered.

These reports can help brands track their overall operations and can measure success while saving time with automated reports on retail execution, sales results, and a lot more.

All of these reasons have made it clear that merchandising apps are a crucial part of an Australian brand’s retail execution strategy. Merchandising apps make tasks more efficient and can gather data in an organized way which will make it easier to analyse it.

If you are looking for a merchandising app that will maximize the success of your retail execution in Australia, then you should take a look at the Optim Merchandising app.

Click here to watch a demo and experience a free trial now.

It is important for all brands to discover the different kinds of metrics that will give them a better understanding of how well their products are performing in retail stores. One of the most important things that you should always keep an eye out for as brands will be the amount of shelf space your products get. Finding out your share of shelf is important because it lets you find out if you are in the best position for maximum sales, if your products are stocked, and whether you are actually getting the share of shelf you agreed on with retailers.

So, what is Share of Shelf?

Share of shelf is a metric that is used to compare the facings of a specific brand to the total number of facing positions available in a store.

Using this metric helps brands quantify the display prominence of their products on shelves. Share of shelf is something similar to market share but it is based on the allocation of shelf space instead of retail sales performance.

4 Reasons Why Brands and Merchandisers Should Measure Share of Shelf

1. Measuring your share of shelf lets you track how hard your products are working on their shelves.

Measuring your share of shelf data along with your sales data allows you to discover whether your brand and your competitor brands are getting their fair share of shelf space compared to how much of a contribution they make to category sales.

This gives you a look at other specific products and brands that are either over-spaced or under-spaced which may be drainers or drivers of the category growth of your products.

If your products are over-performing vs. their sales contributions, they may be able to deliver increased sales if they receive more space at shelf. Also, if the products of your competitors are underperforming, this also presents an important opportunity to grow your share of shelf at their expense.

2. You will be fully prepared for new launches based on your data.

Sometimes, it may be difficult for your brand to introduce new products as you face the risk of cannibalizing your other products which are older.

However, when you can measure the share of shelf data of other competitors, you can have access to relevant data which can help you prepare and optimize for new launches.

This data can help you make a compelling argument for taking space from a competitor and using it for your new product launch instead of sacrificing your own space for your other products.

Related article: How to Use a Merchandising App to Simplify Retail Reporting

3. You will be able to identify new growth opportunities for your products.

When you are able to measure your share of shelf data along with your sales data, you can verify the success of any new product launches based on its execution and sales contribution.

These new product launches and the data and results that you have gathered for them is a great way for you to identify and improve new growth opportunities for your products.

This information allows you to engage in meaningful conversations with your retail partners at a strategic level like negotiating your shelf spaces and proposing other product launches.

4. You can use the share of shelf information of your competitors as a competitive benchmark.

While measuring your own share of shelf is vital for learning about how you can improve your bottom line, looking into the metrics of your competitors can also provide valuable insights for you.

Learning about the share of shelf of your competitors will show you which verticals and which brands they are most invested in.

Measuring this metric can be an effective competitive benchmark because it can demonstrate you and your competitor’s market position. This is because having more SKU’s (stock-keeping units) than your competitors in the most important categories will show that you are winning over those segments.

Tracking the share of shelf metric will help you gain a better understanding of how your products are in key categories over time. This can indicate potential threats from competitors and help you address these early on.

Related article: Retail Planograms: What Are They & Why You Should Use Them (+ Tips)

3 Methods You Can Use to Measure Your Share of Shelf

Understanding why you should be measuring your shelf space is important, but what is more crucial is learning the actual methods you can use to measure it. Here are 3 most common methods for measuring them:

1. Measuring the physical shelves where your products are

One method you can use is using a tape measure and then calculating the percentage of the actual length of the physical shelves that is occupied by your products.

This is one of the most accurate ways to measure as it allows you to account for the various packaging sizes and can give you accurate and reliable data for a better share of the shelves. However, this method is also the most time consuming.

2. Estimating all of the SKUs visually

The SKU or stock-keeping unit is a number that is assigned to a specific product in order to determine its options, manufacturer, and price. A SKU is something that is used to track a product’s inventory in a store.

A fast and easy method of measuring your share of shelf is by simply eyeballing or estimating all of your SKUs visually on shelves. If you are using this simple method, make sure that you use consistent increments like 25, 50, 75 or 15, 30, 45, etc.

This method can be quick and convenient for you but it can also be more prone to errors.

3. Calculating the facings

Probably the most precise method of measuring your share of shelf will be calculating the total SKUs on your shelves and your competitors and then dividing them by the number of  your SKU’s.

Measuring all of these facings will be very time consuming for sales reps but this will give you the most accurate results.

If you are looking for a mobile merchandising app that can help you measure your share of shelf data, then you should check out the Optim Merchandising app.

Optim Merchandising has a lot of different features that can help you and your field reps gather important information and data about your share of shelf and shelf space.

Click here to watch a demo and experience a free trial now.

Learn how you can measure your share of shelf with OptimMerchandising