The Problem with PDFs: How Outdated Tools Are Hurting Your Store Planning Process
When you use multiple static, disconnected tools for store planning and execution, it slows down your visual merchandising process and hinders your retail business’ ability to scale.
If you experience any of these problems regularly, you may be using too many tools for retail operations and may need a better solution.
It takes too much time to plan each store.
When you plan each store individually, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by niche tools:
- Adobe for developing creative signage and displays
- Spreadsheets for product management, adding thousands of SKUs to numerous tabs
- PowerPoint – or worse, paper planograms – to display resets and fixture updates
- Email to communicate plans with store managers and associates
If you have dozens of campaigns per year, that “planning” process can be time-consuming and inefficient.
Solution: Streamline the store planning process with a single visual merchandising platform, instead of four different tools.
A central visual merchandising platform, like One Door, allows you to create, execute, and measure campaigns in a single place.
With visual merchandising software, you can substitute static PDFs and printed materials for an unlimited number of interactive store-specific plans.
These intuitive plans also help you ditch spreadsheets.
All of your campaign information, including any changes to fixtures, signage, or products, is saved and sent to each applicable store.
Using the same merchandising platform, store teams can interact with the mobile planogram that matches their exact store and execute new campaigns faster.
Planograms aren’t executed as you intended.
Too many touchpoints leave a large margin for error.
A lot of people are involved in the store planning process, and if each person is working with a different tool or on multiple campaigns at once, It can be hard for store teams to execute planograms to meet their visual merchandising intent.
Solution: Centralize the platform.
Using a single platform for the entire process – from store planning to planogram execution – allows everyone to work with the same information.
The One Door platform tracks last-minute campaign updates, completion and compliance data, and more.
Even better, you can quickly repeat this agile process for every campaign without worrying about whether plans are being executed properly.
Labor costs are too expensive.
Two common problems with budget allocation in retail are:
- Retail businesses aren’t investing or don’t have the funds to train new associates on proper store execution, which leads to skill gaps.
- Retail businesses are short-staffed with high turnover rates, and associates are burnt out and more susceptible to making mistakes when setting up planograms.
This can lead to poor in-store execution, where customers are left with an inadequate shopping experience, and you’re left with low sales and no brand loyalty.
Solution: Use visual merchandising software to:
- Attach instructions to planograms to quickly upskill staff, reducing the need and cost for extensive in-person training
- Minimize time spent on repetitive tasks, allowing staff to focus on more strategic activities, like helping customers and improving sales
- Assign tasks and digital worklists to store associates to avoid duplicate work and hours of wasted labor
Communication between headquarters and stores is inconsistent.
Relying on only email to communicate with store teams is a risk.
Either your inbox is overcrowded and tasks slip through the cracks, or your inbox is too quiet, and you have to assume your plans are being executed properly.
This lack of communication directly impacts visibility into your stores – or lack thereof.
When HQ can’t keep tabs on store operations, they often experience problems like low compliance, brand inconsistency, and a disorganized in-store experience for customers.
Solution: Close the communication gap.
Visual merchandising software, like One Door, can improve collaboration between headquarters and store teams. It can help track and facilitate better communication through:
- Questionnaires and surveys that provide real-time campaign feedback from store associates
- Communication plans, including visual guidelines and reference materials, from visual merchandising teams
- Completion submissions that directly notify HQ when store teams need to be marked compliant or require further help
Visual merchandising data is siloed, and you don’t know which campaigns actually worked.
If you have different tools for store planning and execution, you likely have even more tools for measuring success.
In this case, “the more the merrier” is not the goal.
Using multiple tools for store planning and execution can lead to disjointed, muddy data. This makes it difficult to see if strategic campaigns were worth the effort.
Solution: Visual merchandising software unifies store data and helps you maintain strategic goals.
Because everything, from creation to execution, is performed within the same platform, you can extract – again, from start to finish – and analyze clean data.
Find answers to questions like:
- What is the total compliance percentage? How about the percentage for a specific region?
- How many types of content did we actually use? Can we save on shipping costs?
- What was the total cost of this campaign?
- How much did we spend per vendor?
- What percentage of stores were able to complete these changes?
- How many visual merchandising issues (revoked photos, missing or damaged items, etc) did we have?
We’re never going to scale our retail business. If we do, it’ll be slow.
If you continue to use outdated processes for visual merchandising, like static PDFs, printable instructions, and crowded spreadsheets, scaling may be slow.
However, there is a solution to scale your retail business efficiently and purposefully. (No more guesswork necessary.)
Solution: Visual merchandising software allows you to standardize processes without planning every store individually. This makes scaling your retail business easier and faster.
Using software like One Door, you can plan at scale and still deliver personalized in-store experiences.
Here’s what improvements you can expect:
- Exact store planning and distribution within hours, not days
- Better brand consistency from store to store
- A decrease in admin time, visual merchandising labor, shipping costs, and print waste
- An increase in compliance points and issue management efficiency
- More time helping customers and improving sales in the store
If you’re looking for a better visual merchandising solution, streamline your retail operations with a central platform.
Request a demo with the retail industry’s choice software: One Door.
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