Planogram is one of the most important category management tools used by retailers. It is mainly because of its purpose that is aimed at increasing profitability. Shoppers mainly falls for impulse buying and purchase items which they have not even planned to buy.

A carefully created planogram should help customers find what they want and increase chances for impulse buying. For this, the category team analyse the demand for each product and its competition to strategically arrange products throughout their stores creating a planogram.

To maximise sales, planogram compliance should be achieved and maintained. Achieving compliance is a big challenge that most of the category and merchandising managers face daily. It is not possible to reach planogram compliance unless there is a process that makes use of a planogram software for compliance checks.

For achieving compliance, it is important to maintain better communication between all the retail channel stockholders, from category team who creates the planogram to the field representatives who validates the planogram at store. There are cloud based planogram software which enable category managers to share and communicate with field representatives on how the products should appear on the retail shelf. Some of them even allows for immediate reporting in case of non-compliance. Cloud based planograms assures if the retail data is accessible to managers at any time, from anywhere and on any device.

Before implementing a planogram software to ensure compliance it is good to check and confirm the following characteristics.

• The planogram should be cloud based, easy to learn and use so that field reps will be comfortable using it to audit the store   

• Real-time access to planogram data, with total elimination of data transcription 

• Real-time monitoring of field activities and automatic notification of critical situations, such as out-of-stocks 

• Data that displays GPS info to protect from fraudulent check-ins 

• Setup of mandatory tasks for each location 

• Store visit scheduling, planning and routing capabilities. 

Without planogram compliance you won’t get the results you want. Communicate your planograms to role players and stores effectively to maintain compliance!