New Technology for Retail Execution and In-Store Support

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Solving Out-of-Stocks with Crowdsourced Intelligence, Mobile Alerting and an On-Demand Workforce

By Marie Jackson, CMO of Retail Solutions Inc. (RSi)

You’ve got the right placement, pricing and point-of-sale merchandising. But how do you know, at the store level, that each critical piece of your strategy is being executed correctly? How do you ensure proper execution of promotional displays, achieve new item planogram compliance or preempt risks for out-of-stocks? What if you could combine sophisticated retailer downstream data transformed into scientific out-of-stock alerts with local intelligence and serve it to your field and sales operations teams on a mobile device for immediate response, remediation and reporting?

Now you can. Retail Solutions Inc., a leader in big data analytics and real-time intelligence for the consumer products industry, has partnered with Gigwalk, a local visibility software platform changing the way brands and retailers collaborate, to bring-to-market RSi Intelligent Crowdsourcing. The new solution provides brands with end-to-end business intelligence that drives sales by delivering real-time, actionable intelligence to field operations for improved in-store retail execution on on-shelf availability.

Here's how it works. The RSi Intelligent Crowdsourcing application blends the company's proprietary algorithms and unmatched on-shelf alerting capabilities with Gigwalk's reach and on-the-ground resources to give customers a laser-focused and immediate in-store activation plan. Leveraging Gigwalk's on-demand public network of 550,000 mobile-enabled independent contractors, brands and retailers can gather localized, in-store intelligence which then gets served back to RSi for data transformation and analysis. The RSi Intelligent Crowdsourcing application then alerts field teams, through their mobile device, where gaps in the supply chain have been identified or triggers actions at the store level to correct errors in near real-time.

Each year, $800 billion in revenue is lost globally to avoidable issues like out-of-stocks. Using RSi Intelligent Crowdsourcing powered by Gigwalk, brands and retailers are armed with three tenets to success: collaboration (data sharing), visibility (finding errors or execution gaps undetected previously) and action (immediate fixes at the retail level). Here's just a few benefits that can be anticipated from this new approach to retail execution and store support:

  • Find and fix errors in hours -- not days or weeks. 
  • Easily scale workforce resources to meet the needs of critical initiatives without incurring unnecessary overhead. 
  • Algorithm-based on-shelf alerting and scorecard reporting to accurately detect store or event conditions.
  • Send real-time fix notices to store teams. 
  • Share observations with the value chain.
  • Reach any store, at any location at any time with accurate alerts.
  • Better react to market pressures and increased competition.
  • Reduce out-of-stocks and improve on-shelf availability.
  • Reclaim lost sales.

Early pilot testing, which was completed was completed with five major retailers and multiple industry leading suppliers, resulted in an average ROI of eight times the original investment. In some instances, returns as high as 18 percent were achieved in just a few weeks' time.

To learn more about RSi Intelligent Crowdsourcing, please visit: http://www.retailsolutions.com