Fayno Market is a retail chain with 130 stores that include discounters, convenience stores, street retail, social stores, and alcohol stores. The range includes 8,000 SKUs. The chain has its own production and gastronomy, 28 bakeries, 17 pizzerias, and 46 grills, where you can always find something fresh and tasty for your dinner.
The Fayno Market chain has highly loyal customers, as evidenced by the "People's Brand 2019" award it received in Ukraine.
Challenge: How retailers can quickly adapt to external changes
Retailers face many issues in their businesses. Solving them either results in a gain in sales and the chain expansion or in an endless struggle with competitors for a market segment if those solutions fail. Companies that stay up to date with innovation and can quickly introduce it into routine processes take the lead. They easily adapt to change. This is especially true at the present time when consumer habits and market conditions are changing.
Success greatly depends on the optimization of the company's internal business processes. An improvement strategy involves a continuous search for solutions to problem areas. Fayno Market has decided to rethink its store display management. After reviewing its activities and key performance indicators, the chain management identified a number of unresolved issues:
- Layout was done manually;
- Planograms construction was carried out in Excel, including an irrelevant range of products;
- There was no communication between the store's employees and the headquarters;
- There was no control over the display and evaluation of its efficiency, which caused a surplus and lost sales.
Thus, the retail chain needed to reconsider its approach to one of the key retail business processes – merchandising. This meant regular systematic work on the efficient display of goods, constructing planograms for each store, monitoring their implementation, and analyzing the results with subsequent adjustments.
When manually constructing a display, there may be errors, and any adjustments to planograms can become rather time-consuming. And wasting time on operational tasks in a rapidly evolving external environment is not beneficial for the retail chain. Therefore, the Fayno Market chain decided to introduce software into its work that would help minimize manual labor, as well as provide full control over a display. They chose Leafio Planogram Optimization.
Objectives of implementing a merchandising automation system
The Fayno Market chain management decided to take a comprehensive approach to eliminate existing problems by introducing an automated system – Leafio Planogram Optimization. The solution gives you an opportunity to perform the following actions online:
- Carry out work with the store database;
- Minimize labor costs for constructing planograms;
- Perform automated displays in real-time;
- Monitor the relevance of the product range;
- Receive various reports on the display efficiency in a few clicks
The result of solving problems in merchandising management
The Fayno Market chain has radically changed its approach to merchandising. Process management has switched to a remote mode: store employees keep in touch with the central office via a mobile application. By going online from any device, they instantly receive up-to-date planograms, promptly learn about any changes in the product range, and send the results of the display as photo reports.
In addition to significant changes in its approach to merchandising, the company has optimized operational work with shelf space and the sales floor.
- The sales floor management system has been automated: a unified database of sales equipment for stores of different conceptions has been created, and the space has been divided into zones for effective display management.
- The process of constructing planograms has been optimized: the chain employees have learned to construct a detailed layout for displaying goods for points of sale of every conception by categories of the main product groups. Automation has essentially reduced the time spent working with planograms.
“Organizing the merchandising management system has significantly improved sales and turnover indicators, helped to track the situation with products, anticipate surplus or shortages of goods, and promptly make changes to the product matrix.” – Fayno Market Manager
Automation of merchandising produces measurable results in the short term.
