Planogram compliance – how boring…unless it might save billions!

Planogram compliance sounds a bit dry…hardly a fun way to spend your day. Can you picture a more mindless task than walking the aisles of your store to ensure that the product layout matches a planogram? Worse yet, the planogram was conceived by Corporate which probably has no understanding of your local market. Let me think of all the things I’d rather do – re-grout the patio brick, clean the cat’s litter, or organize the garage? The problem is planogram compliance is very important. Non-compliance costs hundreds of billions of dollars across retail.

Does that get your attention? As former Senator Everett Dirksen once said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Current solutions involve a store manager or employee walking around with a clipboard and verifying compliance. Higher tech solutions involve pictures taken with a smartphone, then compared to the planograms. Better but still time-consuming and subject to error rates of at least 20-30%. Let’s think about the current process:

  • Expensive
  • Infrequent
  • Inaccurate

Sounds rather flawed and is engaging employees in mindless tasks rather than customer-facing activities.

So, if planogram compliance is so important and so poorly performed right now, what is the answer? The answer rests with COSY technology. Our robots can autonomously navigate a store capturing visual input which can be compared to planograms. Robots don’t get distracted by customers and can survey the store weekly or even daily. Robots aren’t confused by seasonal packaging which can make the task so much harder for a human. As long as the new packaging is in the database, it’s just another product, not a confusing variation on the original product.

Aside from using your employees productively, here are 3 reasons to contact COSY right now:

  • ~ 15 years ago, NARMS found that 44% of retailers could not successfully reset a planogram within the 13 week study period – very little has changed since
  • More recent studies by ShelfSnap, primarily in grocery sellers, showed planogram compliance < 50%
  • A NARMS benchmark study showed that 100% reset compliance can mean a sales lift of 7.8% and a profit improvement of 8.1 within two weeks.

If you’d like to better understand the importance of planogram compliance and see more statistics, check out this great article from Cognizant Business Consulting.