Introduction
In today’s competitive retail market, brands need to leverage technology to gain competitive advantage over their peers. This entails detailed analysis & rendezvous with leading software solutions which have been designed to boost performance of retail players. And with time, these applications have occupied a pivotal role in the retail strategies through which the leading players want to turn the retail tide in their favor. Is success guaranteed in this endeavor? Well, that depends on whether your retail audit process strategies have been shaped on the basis of true market knowledge. Additionally, the companionship of an advanced software solution is also very important. Once you have these two things with you, in-store retail audit strategy execution can be done exactly as planned leading to sell through of your consumer goods. The topic of retail strategy would be incomplete without racking up the audit issue. Inspection, audit, & compliance are right at the top of the mind of the retail managers. And, a retail management software exactly helps in that. In this blog, we will take your through ways to optimize retail audits & will also introduce you to a leading retail audit software.
Here is how you can streamline your retail audit efforts:
Store Compliance Audit
Store is the melting pot of all retailing activities. From source to shelf, this is the place where transactions happen, this is the place where money exchanges hands. So, it’s a high priority. A meaningful retail audit and store audit provides actionable intelligence which one can use for brand protection, guarding company assets, & staying true to industry benchmarks. What are the ways in which you can optimize it? Go through images & videos of retail merchandising & shelfs, ensure promotional compliance & planogram compliance, create a checklist to ensure all the safety procedures are met as per the regulatory standards & create a checklist to record any shortcomings & report them instantly. So far so good, how will you do all these things? This is where the role of a retail audit solution becomes prominent. And as promised, we are going to tell you the name of a trailblazer retail audit solution which is making waves in the industry, it’s WovVIA from WovVTech. This software is just perfect for creating audit checklists & can fulfill all requirements of the store compliance audit & inspection. It will help you to reap all benefits of retail auditing.
Monitor Store Operations
Most leading retail compliance audit software including WovVIA have a dashboard. This dashboard provides key information related to retail auditing right in the front of you. This supervisor dashboard gives a complete picture of the daily retail store operations. The various data which it provides include summary data, compliance rate, & overall health inspection data. The ability to generate alerts & notification in the event of any shortcomings goes a long way in streamlining internal audits of the retail industry. In the case of any shortcomings or compliance failure, you should be able to raise a ticket & assign it to someone for rectification & follow up. In a software like WovVIA, this feature is automated. So, in the event of compliance failure & log deviation, you can raise a ticket & assign it for fixing.
Audit Scheduling
Any effort of inspection & audit for retail stores is incomplete without scheduling & automating options. One should have the option of scheduling the audit in the future, maybe periodically, to fulfil compliance needs. There should also be the option to create the audit & announce it or not announce it. Once you create the audit, it should easily sync with the calendar & must be clearly visible on it. There should be complete automation as far as workflow is concerned, also, you should be able to automate the process of communicating the results, sharing the retail hygiene audits findings, tracking & reporting of safety requirements.
Inventory Tracking & Operations
Retail store inventory management & merchandising compliance entails you carry just as much merchandise in your hand as your customers want which is not too less & not too much. By doing inventory management, retailers ensure that they carry the requisite inventory in hand to meet the shoppers demand without running out of stock or having excess supply. To streamline retail audit and inspection you need to perform everyday stock status checks & keep track of all store operations. You also need to do monitoring of SKU performances to place new orders. You have to have the provision of automatically shooting emails to place orders when inventory falls below a prescribed level.
Reporting & Analytics
Reporting & analytics are key to inspect daily retail store operations & they help in intelligent decision making. You can prepare comprehensive audit reports by collecting data & uploading rich media (like images & video) of the inspection site. One should be able to automatically tag locations & take digital signature of the important stakeholders. Also, generate insightful audit reports with just a few clicks & export the reports in PDF & other formats for carrying around. The ability to share the audit reports internally & also with the audit inspectors & competent authorities is a must. Scheduling of audits & inspections should be also there.
Conclusion
WovVIA is a cloud-based, SaaS modelled low code platform to automate & streamline inspection & auditing of retail stores. This software solution makes the retail auditing & inspection easy, quick, flexible & more accountable. Using the industry-wise predefined question templates you can create surveys to evaluate the performance of your retail store in general & some areas in particular. You can give a big boost to the in-store SKU performance by using the right retail audit checklist from our predesigned templates. You can simply select a checklist from the predefined units or configure one according to your unique requirements. Contact us today to know more about the WovVIA & score a retail audit win.
