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What Constitutes Compliance?

May 31, 2022November 3, 2010 by James Tenser

Is this shelf set correct?

IN MY ROLE as Director of the In-Store Implementation Network, the challenge of merchandising compliance is frequently addressed, from a variety of perspectives – both theoretical and solution-oriented.

Several recent conversations have centered on the question of measuring the accuracy of a shelf set; that is, its degree of compliance with the schematic or planogram. This is actually a non-trivial matter when seeking a practical solution. Since a planogram is a complex tool covering many details (items, facings, positioning, quantities, etc.) determining what data to measure, how often and to what end(s) requires a thoughtful process.

Our valued colleague Mike Spindler, CEO of ShelfSnap has championed this discussion in several items posted on the ISI Network LinkedIn Group page. He is one of the better thinkers we have on this topic, and his company offers a promising tool for digitally comparing an image of an actual shelf set with its associated planogram.

How Close is Close Enough?

If the comparison is “perfect” – that is, all item are present in their proper locations and quantities – we can safely declare that a shelf set is compliant with the plan. This is, however, a rare occurrence which probably exists only for a few minutes after the re-set work is correctly completed. The moment shoppers get to removing items into their baskets, perfect compliance begins to deteriorate. Darn those pesky shoppers!

As I like to say, the “half-life” of a typical shelf set is less time than it takes the re-set crew to leave the building. A slight exaggeration, maybe, but you get the point.

So when do retailers declare a merchandise set to be “out of compliance”? When 9% of items are out of stock (the industry average in grocery)? When 15% of items are present but mis-located? When the number of facings is off on more than 25% of items? Alternatively, what criteria define “in compliance”? All items present and accounted for? 90% of items in the correct place? 99% in-stock? How close is close enough?

Evidently, the ways a planogram can go wrong are numerous but not always numerical. More significantly, they are not easily recognized by human inspection. That is, compliance issues can be hard to spot without a scorecard in hand – and even then it takes concentration and focus and time.

Compliance Shorthand

What if we could define a short-hand method instead – perhaps three to six yes/no metrics that could be taken as a proxy for overall compliance? ISI Network member Larry Dorr, a respected expert on retail merchandising and founder of Jaguar Retail Consulting, described an approach that is worthy of discussion.

He proposes measuring the condition of approximately five or six “destination” items for each category or major subcategory. These are often the highest-velocity items in their respective sections. “Measure the items adjacent to those items,” he says. “If those five and their adjacencies are in correct shape, then the set is probably in good shape overall. If two of the five items are off, you may assume a compliance problem.”

This approach offers economy, speed and ease of implementation. A limitation, he concedes, it that this doesn’t provide a measure of item distribution. While the five-item rule may deliver a directionally correct conclusion about planogram compliance, it may not help very much with gauging the performance of non-destination items.

Also worth noting is how the criteria for compliance may vary across different product categories and classes of trade. Our example above is drawn from a grocery/mass perspective. In specialty apparel and department stores, where color, size and style factor in, the definition and metrics for compliance will differ. Consumer electronics retailers will face their own compliance issues.

Storecard Metrics Needed

So let’s grant that merchandising compliance is a slippery quantity using presently available methods. That doesn’t absolve practitioners from the requirement that they track and measure merchandising performance. In fact innovation in Shopper Marketing, segmentation and automated planograms only intensify the need.

We need creative thinking and some consensus on what constitutes compliance success; on what to measure, how and how often. The goal is to define some compliance best practices and incorporate the metrics into in-store scorecards – what I like to call storecards – that support and enable those practices.

Which leads me to offer this challenge: Use the comment form on this post or on the ISI LinkedIn Group to help us define: What constitutes merchandising compliance? How do you/should we measure it? What are the thresholds? How good is good? What’s the cost of good?

This could be the first step along the road to In-Store Implementation Best Practices. I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Tenser to Lead NARMS Webinar: “Whose Store Is It, Anyway?”

May 31, 2022October 20, 2010 by James Tenser

THE DIRECTOR of the In-Store Implementation Network, James Tenser will pose this provocative question in a 60-minute Webinar hosted by NARMS, the National Association for Retail Merchandising Services.

The Webinar will take place at 1:00 PM Central on Thursday Oct. 28. Review the program here.

Currently some larger Merchandising Services Organizations and Sales/Marketing Agencies are offering proprietary Store Execution Management software to retailers as a value-add. The implications are complex, and they have potential to affect core business practices, including the establishment of what might be called “merchandising captains.”

Should retailers accept “free” SEM software provided by their MSOs and SMAs? Who gains? Who loses? Who should own the data? What other implications of this practice need to be examined for the best interest of our industry? Tenser will explore these issues and answer questions in a lively online program.

(Special Offer: NARMS normally charges guests $99.95 to attend its webinars, but has generously extended a discount price of $29.95 for ISI Network Members. To register, phone the NARMS office at 888-526-2767 and tell them you’re one of us.)

The “Retail Problem” in Public Education

May 31, 2022March 25, 2010 by James Tenser

I RARELY VENTURE outside my core expertise in this blog for (justifiable!) fear of embarrassing myself and those close to me. But I’ve been watching an important societal trend from the sidelines with increasing concern. The topic is public education policy, and the lens through which I view it is the local school system here in Tucson, AZ.

Like I said – that’s a topic that would normally be out of my league. Better left to the experts. Or so I believed, until in a recent flash of insight I realized that our public schools have a retail problem.

Now there’s a subject area I know something about. Maybe in the next few paragraphs I can make a useful contribution to the national dialog on a very troubling issue. I doubt I could make things worse.

Education’s retail problem, in a nutshell, is what we in the stack-it-high-watch-it-fly business of selling stuff call over-storing. Over-storing occurs when retailers build too many buildings to offer goods to a finite number of shoppers. When the ratio of selling space to available dollars gets too high, all the stores suffer for a while, and eventually some go out of business until balance is restored.

This is easy to understand in terms of macroeconomics 101: Too many goods chasing too few dollars results in a lowering of demand.

Today we have a parallel situation in the world of public education due in part to national and local education policy, part due to the current economy, and part due to enduring human nature. The problem is especially acute this year here in Tucson, where there are too many classrooms chasing too few students, resulting in a lowering of demand. In fact, I’d nominate this city’s Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) as the nation’s poster child for over-schooling.

TUSD is presently battered by a perfect storm of negative trends, beginning with historically low funding per student (49th of the 50 states) and exacerbated by recent cuts due to the generally poor local economy. Teacher salaries are an embarrassment. There’s little money for textbooks or paper. Non-core subjects like music, art and P.E. have been largely eliminated. The Federal “No Child Gets Ahead” mandate has required further costly focus on teach-to-the-test classroom tactics.

Adding to this storm is Arizona’s status as the national hotbed of so-called “charter schools,” those privately operated institutions that operate by re-purposing per child state funds. These are often heaped with praise in Washington based on a persistent (but largely baseless) belief that charter schools introduce healthy competition to the educational system that will ultimately raise public school standards and benefit our children.

If there is one thing that TUSD has in profusion today, it is classrooms. The district operates more than 100 elementary, middle and high schools, plus several alternative schools, serving about 55,800 students, for an average of 558 students per building. That average is declining, as more students depart the district each year to attend local charter schools.

The result is some devastating math. Fewer students per school means declining revenues. but the same number of buildings to operate with fixed costs translates into a decline in net spending per student and a loss of classroom and non-classroom jobs.

This is a contributing factor in the elimination of non-core teachers and courses. Naturally, core classes must be preserved to meet state and federal standards. When teaching jobs are cut further, class size must increase, even if classrooms stand empty.

Another wrinkle has to do with exactly which families are shifting their students out of the public schools and into charter schools or other alternatives. Teachers I know observe that the parents who make this decision tend to be more involved with their children’s education and more likely to set high standards for their children. While the evidence is anecdotal, if true this amounts to a flight of the better and brighter away from the public schools. The unintended but devastating consequence of their departure is a lowering of average standardized test scores, evidence which is used to rate and reward schools and teachers.

This impact is demoralizing for teachers and alarming for parents, who respond by transferring more of their children into charter schools each term. But the district’s costs for owning and operating the buildings remain the same; more teacher jobs are lost each year; and the net spending per student continues to creep downward.

One obvious solution for an embattled district like TUSD, that would partially relieve the pressure on operating costs, would be to close some of its superfluous schools and consolidate the children into those that remain. In fact, closure of several smaller elementary schools has been proposed each of the past several years. Vocal local parent groups, who moved into those neighborhoods to be near these schools, successfully quashed these decisions.

Very recently we have heard news from the district of several proposed (and at least one actual) school mergers – whereby two half-empty elementary schools are combined into one with the superfluous building shuttered. In the one announced instance so far, the parents of both schools voted in favor of the change. This is a bit like closing down one of several chain stores when the demographics shift – some business may be lost, but on the whole, the remaining units are more profitable.

So maybe TUSD got that part of the lesson. Lower costs begin with fewer buildings. Unfortunately, with state funding dropping even faster, this instance of economic realism will not be sufficient to forestall even more draconian cuts. How sad for our young people and the dedicated teachers who until recently believed they could make a difference in their lives.

“Plan Through Impact”: Dialog with Dawson

May 31, 2022August 14, 2009 by James Tenser

Tenser’s Tirades recently sat down with Warren Dawson, President of consultancy Dawson Thoughtware, for a conversation about his vision for a comprehensive framework for what he calls Merchandising Resource Management, designed to support superior store-level compliance and effective measurement methods, from initial plans to their ultimate impact on business. The MRM process allows retailers and suppliers to set objectives, measure performance at each process stage, and gauge the impact these have on the overall business.

Dawson was instrumental in organizing the In-Store Implementation Sharegroup and a contributor to its 2008 working paper. He is preparing a new paper, “Plan Through Impact,” that outlines his point of view regarding the next wave of innovation in supermarket store operations, one he believes opens up great opportunities to improve both shopper experience and financial performance.

TT: Warren, you’ve earned a long-standing reputation as one of the visionaries in supermarket merchandising, especially space and assortment management. What’s driving you to speak out again about merchandising compliance?

WD: It’s no secret that I’ve been an advocate along these lines for many years. I started working on the core issues of store-level item distribution in the 1980s. I’ve had the opportunity to help many supermarket and CPG companies tackle space and assortment issues since then. The idea behind the ISI group was to bring together a credible group of companies and industry people to debunk the myth that all is well with In-Store Implementation.

While we’ve seen improvement in supply chain methods, category planning and demand-based insights, the in-store opportunity remains vast – tens of billions of dollars in missed sales, billions in profits. As the ISI Sharegroup working paper showed in 2008, we have barely budged in 20 years on core issues like item availability, promotion compliance, speed to shelf and planogram integrity. I think we have the means to fix those things today.

TT: What do you mean by “Plan Through Impact”?

WD: Well, besides persistent irritants like out-of-stocks and poor promotion compliance, two areas of change in merchandising planning in the grocery industry have brought this need to a higher urgency: The first is Shopper Marketing, which has led to a much greater degree of segmentation and targeting around in-store merchandising and messaging. The second is the adoption of planogram automation tools, which permit retailers to vary merchandising plans down to the store level, if justified by shopper insights.

TT: Those sound like positive developments. Are you skeptical about their value?

WD: Not at all. It’s great, must-do stuff. The challenge is that they introduce an enormous amount of additional intricacy that the industry is not well-prepared to manage. Retailers and CPGs are getting a lot better at formulating subtle and insightful plans, but they lack the know-how and every-day practices to carry those plans out effectively in the stores. There’s a huge risk of wasted spending.

TT: Isn’t that what Workforce Management and Store Execution Management software is supposed to address?

WD: Yes in theory. And these types of tools are likely to be parts of the Merchandising Resource Management solution I envision. They let us formulate a compliance plan and push it out to people in the field. But organizing and communicating tasks is just the first step in the process. There has to be a process for confirming that the tasks get done, measuring them and comparing them to expectation. And you have to be able to share the results to all participants in the process, so they can manage their own performance.

TT: Sounds a lot like the “Plan-Do-Measure” concept advanced by the ISI Network.

WD: Exactly right, although MRM goes further. You need an embedded feedback loop to monitor compliance. Regularity in the information will ultimately help trading partners make better, more realistic merchandising and promotion plans. It’s foolish and costly to plan work that doesn’t get done, and yet that’s what we do every day, because without measurement tools we can’t visualize how our unrealistic plans damage our business outcomes.

TT: So how does “Plan Through Impact” extend this thought process?

WD: By adding three more levels of measurement. Its core is what I call a Compliance Index that synthesizes several store-level metrics into a score that can be rolled up from the item level all the way to the category, cluster or account level. Then compliance must be linked to what we all care about – sales performance results. Finally, we need to connect the dots to measures of business impact – customer experience and loyalty, competitive position, and shareholder value. I sometimes like to call this “Plan-Do-Measure-Measure-Measure-Measure.”

TT: Are you suggesting that we establish a chain of causality connecting a company’s shareholder value all the way back to its merchandising competency?

WD: I believe it’s an achievable goal. Merely tracking merchandising outcomes doesn’t provide a reliable proxy for business performance. We feel intuitively that compliance must have an impact, but we can’t use it to support strategic decisions unless we establish a Plan Through Impact framework.

TT: Sounds challenging. Aren’t you asking for too much?

WD: At one time this might have seemed beyond us, or at least prohibitively costly, but today we have all the elements within our grasp. There’s no shortage of tools to support store level measurement and communications. In fact, many merchandising field organizations are already heavily invested in portable technology with verifiable self-reporting that would support a viable compliance index. Then there are the point solutions for digital image analysis, out-of-stock detection, spot audits, and demand signal analysis to name a few.

TT: If those software and hardware tools are already available, why isn’t the industry already enjoying greater success?

WD: Because they are being put into use ad hoc, and in the absence of a crucial thoughtware layer. Merchandising Resource Management is a business process, not a technology. It requires some changes in business practices at the store level, as well as for decision-makers and administrators. Also, because it creates greater transparency of compliance performance, it has potential to change the way trading partners collaborate for success. Most companies are going to need a little help putting this into practice.

TT: How can companies educate themselves further about this?

WD: Interested parties are welcome to email me at WarrenDawson@gmail.com for a copy of the paper or to discuss a consultation. A good place to begin reading is the In-Store Implementation Network site. Many downloads are available with free registration.