POI Pulse July 17, 2017

only Vendor Panorama for Retail Execution and Monitoring in Consumer
Goods.  Market trends are discussed, and designations for Best-in-Class vendors in specific areas are in the report.  You may access your copy here. 

Product Vision:   The ability to articulate future product needs and have them included in the product as early adopters in the market
are prepared to embrace them. Special consideration will be given to capabilities, whether proprietary or embedded through a partnership, which enhance user productivity and enable decision making while at the
retail outlet. We refer to these as the “sell more”
capabilities and they are as follow:

* Retail Activity Optimization
(RAO) – This uses recent (daily or more frequent) point
of sale (POS) data to determine which stores to visit, what to do while there to drive the greatest return on resources, and the best sequence for reducing drive time. RAO not only optimizes in-store execution, but also reduces cost factors, such as fuel and the personnel costs
associated with visiting locations where there is low or no need.

* Image recognition
– This captures an image of the store shelf and transmits it into the cloud where images of manufacturers’ and competitors’ brands are
analyzed to determine compliance to approved schematics, compliance to
some promotional agreement, key performance indicators (KPIs) such as share-of-shelf, and so forth. This drives the activities the salesperson will engage in at that store after the few minutes it takes
for the results to come back to that person’s mobile device.

* Guided selling – This utilizes branching logic, store-specific
data, fact-based selling, and graphical delivery to direct activities and maximize impact at the individual store level.

* Social capabilities – This harnesses the power of social
networks between peers and from managers to peers to give immediate feedback, solve problems, and share best practices from within the
retail execution solution without having to resort to a separate tool.

* Gamification
– This utilizes leader boards, compensation simulation, embedded games, as well as daily/weekly contests as motivators for the field force.

* Voice recognition – This enables a field salesperson to speak into a Bluetooth headset for taking orders or entering observations about the store shelf, rather than keying the information into a mobile
device.

* In-flight analytics – These are capabilities that provide
insights that can be harnessed immediately by a field salesperson to improve results. We refer to this area as “in-flight analytics” because it provides a stream of insight about performance and opportunities. Surprisingly, many solutions we have
evaluated cannot do this because they cannot work offline or must send
transactional data to the central server and back to the device to provide these insights.

* Virtual reality – This allows the visualization of an image
such as a display module or cooler within the context of an individual retail outlet to provide the best possible understanding of appearance
and fit.

* Configurability – This refers
to the ability to accommodate nuances at various user levels without having to write code. Special consideration is given to solutions that allow non-technical personnel to manage various levels of configuration
without involving the vendor. Also, this is where individual users can configure their own solution based on how they like to work or view
information.