‘War of the Shelves’ – Speed can be the deciding factor
When the British fleet defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, the victory was down to the short loading time required for British cannons. We’ll spare you the details, but when the British realised this, thanks to the discerning pirate Francis Drake, the Armada’s fate was sealed.
Does Avento deal in cannons from the past? Not at all. We deal in the technology of the future. The loading time for the mobile CRM-app Fearless Leader is short, very short.
The relevant aspects will be outlined in a second blog dedicated to Avento’s round table for Fearless Leader users. That will illustrate, as explained in a previous blog, that a ‘War of the Shelves’ or a fight for visibility on the shelves, is currently ongoing. The participants in the round table event showed significant interest in range management.
Quicker fire-power with Fearless Leader
The quicker you can implement your circumstance-based range changes on the shelves, the higher your sales will be. The fight for ‘share of shelf’ is unrelenting. Anyone who takes their eye off the ball will have to fight hard to regain their ground. That’s why we use the wartime analogy. This introduction was also vital for stressing the importance of this issue.
‘The process of changing the range used to involve three main steps. Making the decision. Adapting the range lists. And correctly communicating with the field workers. But it often involves dozens of lists per manufacturer, often with varying ranges per store or channel, and dozens of products. Step 2 is highly labour-intensive as a result. Step 3 is open to errors. Step 1, deciding, is a major step and should not be taken lightly’, according to Chantal Roobrouck, Business Development Manager at Avento.
In one fell swoop
‘Excel lists may well have been consigned to the past but there still tends to be three distinctive steps in a digital environment. With Fearless Leader, it is all done in one fell swoop. With copy/clone functions, amendments are implemented in the blink of an eye and one mouse-click gives the field workers the right instructions.’
‘This streamlining also works in the other direction, of course. From external locations to management, Fearless Leader guarantees the same processing speed. This is superior thanks to the integration of Fearless Leader with the back office and offline availability with Resco.net (multi-access without data loss). All of the data that is captured during store checks are available to the management in real-time’, adds Chantal.
