Increase retail efficiency with AI-powered Category and Space Management – Customer Story
As a retail professional, you focus on driving revenue by maximizing the effectiveness of each square feet of display fixtures and floor space. But do you ever feel like there is something missing? You are not the only one! Retailers everywhere are struggling to address increasingly complex tasks and requirements, fast-changing business conditions, and tough competition in their efforts to effectively manage all retail processes, internal communications, and customers’ expectations.
How does the transition from manual to automated space optimisation makes the difference? Dixons SE-Europe knows it well!
Since starting to use Plano360 Smart Retail Management System in their stores, they have achieved a more efficient, paperless and data-led approach to store planning, which has resulted in more than 97% planogram compliance, stock optimization and much better stock transparency. All in one, they now have a much better understanding on “what goes wrong into each store”.
Dixons SE-Europe is the leading electrical and electronic retailer in Greece. They are a 70-year-old company and member of Currys Group, formerly Dixons Carphone, from 2005. They are an omnichannel retailer with about 100 stores in Greece, 2 stores in Cyprus, 2 e-commerce sites and a Call Center.
The visual merchandising and sales teams had a significant challenge to ensure the optimal store planning while providing the best customer experience. They were spending countless man hours designing planograms and realograms and exchanging thousands of emails with the stores, inventorying the shelves, checking for display errors, and carrying out strenuous communication between remote locations and the HQ.
The IT teams were also spending a huge amount of time on syncing data from multiple systems, ensuring data accuracy and validity, developing effective reports, and supporting category & merchandising departments in automating their processes.
They were looking for a platform capable of managing tens of thousands of SKUs and square meters, automating time-consuming manual tasks and processes while providing flexibility and customization.
By adopting Plano360, Yodiwo’s end-to-end retail management system, day-to-day processes are now automated, saving staff time by more than 50%. The number of daily emails between stores and headquarters is reduced by more than 90% due to the real-time communication feature. By automating the space management process, every physical store has now its own digital twin and the planogram designers can visualize and optimize the customer journey to securely increase each shop floor’s sales volumes.
Integrating it with the ERP, inventory management as well as pricing and eLabels systems under one single platform allows Dixons SE-Europe to make the right data-driven business decisions by easily producing a true digital twin of each store with minimum data capturing costs.
“Having all the needed data from each store regarding stock management, product placements, special offers placements and monitoring, heat-maps etc. in one place and with a process that ensures accuracy and validity without burning valuable store staff time, the solution becomes a valuable enabler of new unique capabilities.
We managed to maximize the effectiveness of each store and optimize each furniture and shelf space, and at the same time, control and visualize everything.”
Yannis Papidis
CTO, Dixons SE Europe
All store managers have embraced Plano360, as they work with less frustration and their problems are not lost anymore among the tons of emails the head office used to receive.
DIXONS SE-Europe achieved the successful digital transformation of Visual Merchandising as well as the optimization of the sales network performance. The platform offers a wide range of applications, which have as their primary goal the optimization of the consumer shopping experience.
The main benefit they have seen from the automation of space and category management is the increase of retail store sales through:
- a single view of stock, and accurate inventory visibility to facilitate profitable eCommerce fulfilment from stores without the need to “block” stock for the online sales
- high planogram compliance thanks to the better monitoring of merchandizing implementation
- improved customer experience through personalized contextual customers’ journeys
- return on space KPIs and floor optimization (through heatmaps)
- more effective shelves replenishment
- better communication between stores and HQs
- hundreds of hours saved for both stores personnel and HQ teams
- labour cost saving to achieve more with existing staff
- real time stock placement
- reliable data collection and predictive data analysis for a data-driven decision-making process
- employee performance tracking
- simplified processes that facilitate growth
- products that are in stock and not displayed are substantially reduced
At Yodiwo, we work with high-volume, multi-shop clients. This is how we got to apply, proof-test, and further develop our smart retail platform, Plano360. Over the past years, by automating their category & space management process, our customers have achieved on average more than 5% retail sales increase per ft2, 40% better overall stores efficiency, 50% time saved and +97% planogram compliance.
Should you wish to find out how you can reap the benefits from automating your retail workflow, or how easy it is to implement a complete and reliable visual merchandising solution, our retail experts will be happy to answer your questions over a free consultation call.
If you would like to learn more about the Dixons SE-Europe case, please join our VP of Business Development, Kostas Papadopoulos, who will present it in more detail on March 3rd at 2:00 pm, Theater 12, at Smart Retail Tech Event, or come and talk to us during the show at stand No. ST1811.
