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Planogram Compliancy Check by SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer and RICOH

Bianca Koene, 02 mei 2018

In the retail business, placement of your goods is very important to maximize sales and minimize wasted space. For this reason, many retail companies make use of planograms to agree on an optimum display of their goods in the stores.

The next step is then for the sales reps to go and check in the stores and see if the store manager has placed the merchandise as agreed upon in the planogram. In case derivations of the planogram are found, corrective actions in store need to be taken. For example, when a good is out of stock it needs to be placed back on the shelf. Or in case the number of facings (defined as the number of identical products displayed to the customer on a shelf) is not correct, it needs to be corrected, preferably during the store visit of the sales representative.

As you can imagine, checking the placement of your merchandise according to planograms is a very precise and time-consuming job. For this reason, SAP & RICOH have jointly developed a planogram compliance solution that enables a sales rep within a visit, created in SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer, to: capture photos of a retail shelf, analyze the images real-time, identify issues and take corrective actions accordingly.

For one of our customers, we are currently investigating this integration between RICOH and SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer. There are some really exciting functionalities that I would like to give you a sneak preview of in this blog.

Solution Overview

RICOH has developed:

SAP has developed:

How does it work

The Green Ball Interface (which is delivered as an integrated app in SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer on the mobile device) is a very effective way of making pictures of the actual situation in the store. See below two pictures. 

When entering the store, the sales representative opens a planned visit in SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer on his/her mobile device. From here, he/she can start taking pictures of the actual situation on the shelves with the green ball interface by clicking the camera icon in the planogram tab (which can be scoped in in SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer). The idea is that the sales representative starts in the upper top corner of the shelf and then moves his/her mobile device in the direction of the arrow and green ball (see green dot in the above picture). The goal is to move your device until the green ball is in the inner white circle. Once the green ball is in the center of the circle, a picture is automatically taken. Then the arrow and green ball guides you downwards or to the right and a picture is once again taken when the green ball is in the center of the circle. Continue to follow the green ball capturing images until you reach the end of the shelf. This way you are guided alongside the shelves in a snake kind of pattern. Once you are done taking pictures, RICOH stitches all the pictures together and a ‘Real-o-gram’ is returned with issues (for example product not on stock, mix in facings, missing facing etc.).

You can then click on the corrective action view to find the details about the issue. The following information will be displayed amongst others:
Once the sales rep has taken a corrective action, he/she can change the status of the issue accordingly, for example corrected, and the Corrective Action will turn white, meaning the issue has been resolved.

Admin Console in SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer

In SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer you have a new functionality called Planocheck Administrator. You can open this from the Administrator -> Sales and Campaign Settings path (assuming you have the correct licenses and scoped it in).

From here you can upload your planogram, your individual product images, and maintain your corrective actions for example.

Benefits of integration RICOH and SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer

Because of this jointly developed ‘planogram compliancy solution’ by SAP and RICOH, back-office should benefit of better scene capture and better product recognition, therefor better data quality and understanding of the store situation. As a result, improved analytics and reporting can be achieved. Also, it will be possible to collect and monitor additional KPIs, next to or instead of traditional surveys.

Conclusion

Like mentioned in the introduction, we have just started to look into this functionality for one of our customers. This means we are still exploring functionalities and possibilities. But so far, we are really excited about what we have seen.
Please keep your eye on this blog, because it will be continued with more details in one of our next blogs!

Bianca Koene

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