One of the critical factors allowing you to sell more at the POS is on-shelf availability. However, it is not only about the physical presence of your offer on the shelves. It is much more complicated. The whole process includes the necessity to continually guarantee the right products, in the right stores in the right quantity. How do you manage the availability of your products appropriately to exploit their sales potential fully?
When your offer is not present at a specific point of sales where your shoppers can expect it, you lose the money invested in production and promotion. To prevent this, you must be able to cover the proper retail outlets with your goods. Recent technology can help you to maintain sales at the POSs at an appropriate level.
Five technologies helping consumer goods companies ensuring proper on-shelf availability:
- Use ongoing AI-based Segmentation capabilities to identify those stores where given categories sell best. Do not sell everything everywhere. Select the stores with the highest sales potential for the specific product categories. Take into account factors like local demand, consumer preferences, seasonal trends, etc. Direct your field sales force to carefully selected customers at a given moment and fill their shelves with the right products. You are most likely to be successful then.
- Leverage Demand Signals by collecting sell-out information of distributors within the entire category. It helps you to reach the points of sales where a given product category sells but your situation is unsatisfactory, or the stores were your specific offer is not included yet.
- Use AI-driven Route Optimisation to add points of sales to your routes dynamically. RAO takes into account priority triggers like out-of-stock, sales decrease or potential for greater sales. Based on this it suggests you visiting the customers where the activity will have the biggest impact. When on-site, RAO can also provide your sales representatives with task recommendations. One of these can initiate an order to avoid out-of-stocks in the near future.
- Use VMI to guarantee that your products are always available on the market in the right quantity. Take into account your distributors’ sell-out, current warehouse stocks and predicted demand, including the demand changing factors like promotions and seasonality. Help your trade partners to plan appropriate deliveries, finding the inventory balance within the range of overstocks and out-of-stocks. All to ensure an uninterrupted distribution of your goods to retail stores.
- Use self-service virtual cooperation with the stores. In case of out-of-stock, the POS personnel can inform you immediately using the Customer Portal about their needs. They do not have to wait until the next in-store visit. You can quickly initiate replenishment of the missing SKUs and avoid losing sales. Alternatively, enable the POS personnel to place orders by themselves and direct them to proper distributors.
Learn more about our solutions for the FMCG industry which allows you to ensure proper on-shelf availability. Visit the Omnichannel for FMCG by Asseco website.
