Introduction
In today’s competitive retail market, brands need to leverage technology to gain a competitive advantage over their peers. This entails detailed analysis and rendezvous with leading software solutions that have been designed to boost the 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 the sale of your consumer goods. The topic of retail strategy would be incomplete without raising the audit issue. Inspection, auditing, and compliance are at the top of the minds of retail managers. And retail management software exactly helps with that. In this blog, we will take you through ways to optimize retail audits and also introduce you to a leading retail audit software.
Here is how you can streamline your retail audit efforts:
Store Compliance audits
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 and store audit provides actionable intelligence that one can use for brand protection, guarding company assets, and staying true to industry benchmarks. What are the ways in which you can optimize it? Go through images and videos of retail merchandising and shelves to ensure promotional compliance and planogram compliance; create a checklist to ensure all the safety procedures are met as per the regulatory standards; and create a checklist to record any shortcomings and 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 trailblazing retail audit solution that is making waves in the industry: WovVIA from WovVTech. This software is just perfect for creating audit checklists and can fulfill all requirements of the store compliance audit and inspection. It will help you reap all the benefits of retail auditing
Monitor Store operations.
Most leading retail compliance audit software programs, including WovVIA, have a dashboard. This dashboard provides key information related to retail auditing right in front of you. This supervisor dashboard gives a complete picture of the daily retail store operations. The various types of data that it provides include summary data, compliance rate data, and overall health inspection data. The ability to generate alerts and notifications in the event of any shortcomings goes a long way toward streamlining internal audits in the retail industry. In the case of any shortcomings or compliance failures, you should be able to raise a ticket and assign it to someone for rectification and follow-up. In software like WovVIA, this feature is automated. So, in the event of a compliance failure or log deviation, you can raise a ticket and assign it for fixing.
Audit Scheduling
Any effort to inspect and audit retail stores is incomplete without scheduling and automating options. One should have the option of scheduling the audit in the future, maybe periodically, to fulfill compliance needs. There should also be the option to create the audit and announce it or not. Once you create the audit, it should easily sync with the calendar and be clearly visible on it. There should be complete automation as far as workflow is concerned; you should also be able to automate the process of communicating the results, sharing the retail hygiene audit findings, and reporting safety requirements. Inventory Tracking and Operations
Retail store inventory management and merchandising compliance entail carrying just as much merchandise in your hand as your customers want, which is not too little or 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 audits and inspections, you need to perform everyday stock status checks and keep track of all store operations. You also need to monitor SKU performance to place new orders. You have to have the provision of automatically sending emails to place orders when inventory falls below a prescribed level.
Reporting and Analytics
Reporting and analytics are key to inspecting daily retail store operations, and they help in intelligent decision-making. You can prepare comprehensive audit reports by collecting data and uploading rich media (like images and videos) from the inspection site. One should be able to automatically tag locations and take the digital signatures of important stakeholders. Also, generate insightful audit reports with just a few clicks and export the reports in PDF and other formats for carrying around. The ability to share the audit reports internally and also with the audit inspectors and competent authorities is a must. Scheduling of audits and inspections should also be there.
Conclusion
WovVIA is a cloud-based, SaaS-modeled low-code platform to automate and streamline the inspection and auditing of retail stores. This software solution makes retail auditing and inspection easy, quick, flexible, and more accountable. Using the industry-specific predefined question templates, you can create surveys to evaluate the performance of your retail store in general and some areas in particular. You can give a big boost to 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 learn more about the WovVIA and score a retail audit win.
