What is Retail Execution Software (RES)?
Retail execution software is a set of digital tools, usually available in both desktop and mobile formats, that streamline and enhance all aspects of in-store execution. It assists team leaders, who orchestrate work and analyze performance, and frontline teams, who execute assigned work.
Some retail execution software providers require users to have multiple apps to perform various functions, but the new gold standard for retail execution software gives users a unified solution that combines all capabilities into one efficient interface.
Who Uses Retail Execution Software?
Retail execution software serves any business type that sells, services, or merchandises products in a physical retail store. Retailers themselves are the most obvious fit for retail execution software, but the third-party teams who visit and complete work within retailers’ stores are also prime candidates.
In fact, when retail execution software first hit the market a few decades ago, it originally served field reps who visited stores and completed work on behalf of merchandising service organizations (MSOs) and/or Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies (we’ll go into greater detail about these business types below).
Back then, field teams relied on phone calls, clipboards, and word of mouth to track, verify, and share performance with leadership. Retail execution software enhanced this process by giving field reps digital tools that not only improved the efficiency of their in-store work but also gave leadership greater visibility of that work.
Over the years, retail execution software evolved to address a much wider spectrum of execution needs, allowing other business types like retailers to leverage its capabilities. Now, some retail execution software is able to serve all teams who complete merchandising related work in retail stores, opening the door to exciting new possibilities for cross-organizational collaboration.
Because retail execution software encompasses so many things and serves different needs for different business types, let’s break down the four primary use cases for execution software.
CPG Companies – Field Teams
CPG companies have long been power users of retail execution software. Despite the rise of direct-to-consumer (D2C), many brands still rely on retailers to maximize their brand presence and drive sales across channels.
The finite shelf space and constant foot traffic of retail stores offer brands a competitive advantage over purely e-commerce marketplaces. In a store, shoppers only have a small selection of products to choose from in every category. This built-in scarcity can be extremely valuable to brands that can consistently execute in stores, which is why many CPG companies leverage RES.
CPG companies either have internal field teams who visit and service their brands in stores or they hire third-party labor providers (a.k.a., MSOs) to complete this work for them. In either scenario, RES is crucial for staying on top of replenishment and on-shelf availability, visual merchandising and planogram compliance, and sales performance per store or territory.
Without a retail execution software, CPG companies have little to no visibility of in-store work and field rep performance and lack the tools needed to execute quickly and flawlessly in today’s fast-paced store environment. Even if they hire a third party for store execution, they can indirectly leverage the benefits of a retail execution software by hiring an MSO who uses one (and most do).
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The Most Common Capabilities of a Retail Execution Software
We’ve touched on some of the key capabilities of retail execution software for each of the four main audience types, but let’s dive a little deeper into the standard functionality.
Not all providers will necessarily have all the below features, and the depth of each feature may vary, but this list should give you a solid understanding of the possible ways that retail execution software can help you elevate your in-store presence.
Task Management
This is the foundation of every retail execution software. It’s a way for store or field team leaders to efficiently create, assign, and distribute tasks to frontline employees, and it’s a way for frontline employees to stay on top of assigned work.
Most retail execution software supports both manual and automated tasking to address the different types of in-store work. Manually created tasks are great for special, one-off projects. Team leaders can provide detailed instructions, attach files and media, and push out tasks to frontline teams’ mobile phones for seamless coordination.
Automated tasking is ideal for recurring projects like on-shelf replenishment. Team leaders can define the parameters of their desired automations to reduce their administrative workload and improve productivity. For example, if items hit a certain threshold that makes them at-risk of being out-of-stock, an automated alert can be sent to the appropriate frontline employee to restock the shelves.
Item Management & Ordering
Only a few retail execution software offer item management and ordering functionality, but it is arguably one of the most powerful capabilities that a retail execution software can offer store and field teams as it allows for streamlined replenishment, reordering, and sales tracking.
Instead of restricting your item catalog and SKU information to an inventory management system that doesn’t account for real-time in-store product availability, you can integrate this data into a retail execution software so that frontline teams can inform and improve your inventory accuracy and speed-to-shelf.
For example, if a store associate or field rep notices a disparity in the amount of product on shelves and on record (due to either shrink-related losses or poor shelf replenishment practices), they can quickly flag the disparity so that your inventory management data is up to date with the most accurate information. This is especially important for honing in the accuracy of your demand planning to prevent costly over- or under-ordering.
You can also take things one step further (if you’d like to) by empowering your frontline teams to place order requests for items whenever they identify an out-of-stock risk. Large retailers are less likely to use this feature because they typically place orders in large batches months in advance, but it can be especially powerful for organizations with field teams as they can be more agile with their ordering and store-specific replenishment.
Lastly, item management gives teams a better way to track and analyze sales performance. Because frontline employees can inform inventory data from the source, team leaders are able to more quickly and accurately identify shifts in consumer behavior—and can better track individual product performance by store, territory, and season.
Scheduling
This is an important capability that streamlines field rep deployment (in the case of CPG companies, MSOs, and distributors) and shift scheduling (in the case of retailers).
RES enables field team leaders to easily identify the optimal store for each field rep based on customizable parameters such employee-to-store proximity, employee hour constraints, and store priority. For retailers, it enables store managers to easily schedule shifts to ensure that tasks never fall to the wayside and that store operations run smoothly.
Communications
Using texts, phone calls, and email to communicate about in-store execution no longer cuts it. You could use a third-party messaging platform, but it’s much better to have communications integrated into your existing retail execution software.
For example, if a frontline employee has a question about an assigned task (“I can’t find product X in the back-room storage”), he or she can submit a question to the appropriate person in the same mobile app they’re using to execute the task. This makes communication quicker, more organized, and more compliant.
RES typically supports all the familiar functionality of a comms module, such as:
- bidirectional 1-to-1 messaging
- group messaging
- team or company-wide announcements
An integrated comms module is slightly more important for store teams than field teams—as there is much more peer-to-peer collaboration at play—but both groups can benefit from streamlined messaging for the times when supplementary information is needed to adequately complete work.
Analytics & Reporting
Retail execution is about more than the coordination and completion of work—it’s also about measuring and analyzing the progress of that work, the performance of individual team members, and the performance of products over time by store. For these reasons, pretty much every RES has some level of analytics and reporting capability.
Having access to insightful dashboards in the same digital work hub used to plan and assign work is a great feature for leadership teams. It not only helps with short-term deployment and merchandising strategies but also long-term corporate level strategies around product selection and store allocation.
Proof of Performance
Somewhat related to reporting, proof of performance (POP) is a key feature for retail execution software, especially for remote teams. A store manager can walk the aisles and easily see whether shelves are being well-maintained, but field team leaders, historically, have had to rely on log sheets to gain minimal insights into performance.
A retailer may still leverage POP for intermittent store audits, but it is very much a feature geared toward CPG companies, MSOs, and distributors. The way it works can vary between providers, but typically it allows frontline teams to capture photos of completed work with their mobile device and quickly submit through the RES app for review and record keeping. Some RES providers are even experimenting with photo recognition AI to streamline this review process for admin users.
Retail Partner Collaboration
We talked about the benefits of a retailer embracing cross-organizational collaboration, but all entities in the store execution environment can benefit from it. The thing is, retail is a collaborative industry, especially in the context of a physical store environment; but historically, companies have operated in siloes, communicating on an as-needed basis, not being proactive with their coordination, and certainly not giving each other visibility into projected demand levels or production capacities.
Not too surprisingly, retail execution software has stepped in to fill the need for better, more streamlined retail-partner collaboration. And it makes sense: all RES must do to aid with cross-organizational collaboration is build data bridges between each party.
If the entire store ecosystem is unified through the same retail execution hub, you can imagine how much more efficient and precise teams could become. All the value-driving features of retail execution software would be extended and multiplied across each participating party.
The future of retail work is radically transparent and collaborative, and the early adopters of this new paradigm will be the ones best positioned to reap the benefits.
Is Retail Execution Software Worth the Investment?
Believe it or not, not all teams who work within a store environment use retail execution software, even if it would greatly benefit them. Instead, some companies opt for two alternatives:
- Building and maintaining a home-grown software solution
- Using a hodgepodge of disparate solutions that may or may not be designed for retail work specifically (the most common example being a heavy reliance on CRM software)
The first option may suffice for smaller organizations, but only if they have no plans of scaling their business. The larger their operations grow, the more unwieldy and cost-ineffective a home-grown solution becomes.
Software development is a domain all its own, and it requires significant financial and temporal investment that most companies cannot afford to make. A dedicated retail execution software partner can lift these burdens off the shoulders of retail teams and free them to focus on the type of work their business was built around.
The second option is tempting because it is usually less expensive than retail execution software, but what it saves in money it loses in value. Requiring your team to jump between disparate solutions is a recipe for inefficiencies and mistakes. And using software that isn’t designed specifically to address the executional needs of retail teams puts a governor on your success.
Why, then, have some organizations not adopted retail execution software? Well, it can be costly, and it often requires an intensive implementation and onboarding process. But as we will attempt to elucidate, the right RES can give your organization returns well beyond its investment.
The Quantitative Benefits of Using Retail execution software
We can’t speak for other retail execution software providers, but our solution has been able to provide companies with a wide range of tangible ROI. Here are some of the most common ones:
- Out-of-stocks: 12% reduction
- Labor costs: 8% reduction
- Top-line sales: 3% increase
- Promotional compliance: 99% achievement
The Qualitative Benefits of Using Retail execution software
Because retail execution software serves so many different types and sizes of businesses, quantitative benefits can sometimes be misleading. But regardless of your organization’s unique circumstances and makeup, you can expect the following improvements to your executional operations with the right retail execution software partner:
- Improved visibility of employee, store, and product performance
- Significant reduction in administrative workload
- More efficient and effective orchestration of tasks
- Improved inventory accuracy (and, therefore, forecasting accuracy)
- A dedicated support team who is available around the clock
- A long-term business partner who is as committed to your success as you are, who is constantly improving its product to better serve the always-changing needs of in-store teams
- An easily and infinitely raisable ceiling for executional success
Is Retail Execution Software Right for Your Company?
Only you can answer this question, but we can point you in the right direction. We’ve created a complementary retail execution software buyer’s guide for those interested in learning more about the finder details of retail execution software.
