Retail Management at Your Fingertips | Petr Kavánek
Petr Kavánek
Today’s retail industry is characterised by the highest customer and retailer awareness level ever. It has never been easier for customers to compare a product with competing offers, and never has such a wide variety of choices been within easy reach. Retailers, in turn, have never before had such detailed information about their customers, their habits, and preferences as they do today.
Customer satisfaction is the number one priority for any retailer today. The primary objective of retail management is customer satisfaction. Effective planning and management often prevent customers from waiting even when the stores are congested; as in public events, retail management goes a long way to guarantee customer contentment.
The EU-based company Quant Retail offers a wide range of solutions for retail. Their integrated software system Quant allows users to efficiently combine the management of retail space, planograms, shelf labels, and marketing materials with task management, reporting, and automatic replenishment.
Quant helps to plan and optimize the sales space and related processes so that customers feel comfortable, oriented and happy to return to the store. Thanks to advanced automation and intelligent tools available within one integrated platform, each store’s space and sales specifics can be taken into account without heavy demands on human resources. Several of their customers manage to create store-specific planograms and layouts for more than 400 stores with a team of 2-3 people.
Making Right Decisions
Via Quant users are able to make the right decisions in the field of visual merchandising and thus increase sales and customer satisfaction. Quant allows users to create a detailed digital image of each store. It then automatically identifies similar space elements for which users specify their visual merchandising plan by creating a planogram template. Quant then generates dozens or hundreds of optimized store-specific planograms from a single template using available sales, space and priority data. Customers thus find the products they are interested in at the right place and in the right quantity in the store.
From the beginning Quant was developed as a cloud-based solution to enable easy user. The company’s pricing from the beginning was based on the number of stores managed in Quant, not on per-user licenses. Therefore, they have always been able to afford to introduce innovative features and automation that make the human resource requirements of operating Quant significantly lower than what is common in similar solutions.
Quant focuses mainly on process optimization. It is not software in which it is possible, for example, to only create a planogram. This is just the beginning, so the system also deals with sharing planograms with stores, control of implementation deadlines, including photo documentation and subsequent evaluation of the success of implemented changes.
Integrated Platform
Integrated task management allows users to create tasks and subtasks, assign responsible persons and priorities. Thanks to planograms, Quant can determine which type of price tag to use for a given product. Automatic ordering recognizes the shelf capacities allocated to each product, and there are many more such examples.
Quant is unique in the combination and volume of the retail challenges it solves within one integrated platform.
For example, a new product needs to be listed and displayed in the stores. Therefore, the product is placed in the appropriate place in the corresponding planogram template, based on which a new set of planograms is automatically generated for all stores affected by the change. The store staff receives the change notification, implements the new planogram and attaches a photo of the implementation.
However, one store does not have the new product in stock yet, so the staff reports the problem and attaches all details to the report, including the ability to click through to the planogram. The report automatically goes to the right person in the supply chain department who will arrange delivery of the missing product to the store or finds an alternative solution.
A price tag is also automatically prepared for the new product in the correct size and design for the location.
Based on the sales, this new product will be automatically replenished.
The head office resolves several errors in implementing the new planograms thanks to photo documentation without having to physically visit the store, and corrects several shelf dimensions that were incorrectly entered in the system.
The analysts then track the impact of the change on overall sales and monitor how the new product performs.
This could go on and on, but the point is that the users did not have to use a software system other than Quant to deal with the entire situation described. It makes it much easier and more efficient for head office to work with stores, suppliers and technical teams.
Quant has already found users in 31 countries, and that number could grow to more than 40 by the end of 2022. Their position is historically strongest in Europe, but they also have customers in Latin America, Arab countries, Africa and Asia.
Towards the Future
Quant successfully covers various retail types from FMCG, DIY, pharmacies, drugstores, car accessories to fashion.
An area Quant has been working hard on in the last three years and see a great future in is space planning in fashion retail, which has many specifics due to the huge fluctuation of products and their short life cycle. The solutions they are creating together with their customers like Sportisimo in this sector are already starting to deliver great results.
Quant recently included an extension to their offering to enable store checks and information gathering via user-defined forms in terms of new features. Shortly, Quant will officially introduce a new module for managing product master data and a module for space reservations, which will allow customers’ suppliers to reserve space not only for product displays but also for marketing materials.
" Quant helps to plan and optimize the sales space and related processes so that customers feel comfortable, oriented and happy to return to the store.”
