Combined with a merchandising skills gap, high turnover, a workforce that has increasingly disparate responsibilities (assisting customers, downstocking, merchandising execution, and checkout), a “last-mile” problem is created in stores, where the upstream investment fails to pay off because the merchandising plan is never executed completely. Intelligent, mobile-optimized assistants help address this problem by guiding store associates, at any level of experience, through the initial set quickly and accurately by telling them how to set stores, instead of simply what to set.