How Mobile Retail Execution Can Improve Field Productivity

In an ideal world, product and goods manufacturers have the ability to ensure that every single item they produce is bought, and used. However, in most cases, a manufacturer either has the chance to produce below their demand, and constantly be out of stock – missing out on valuable opportunities to make more customers, and make those customers happy – or they overproduce, landing themselves in a situation where products and goods go to waste because no one picked them up, and manufacturers are forced to collect whatever they can at a loss from these last few stragglers through the promotional efforts of associated retailers.

In an ideal world, manufacturers wouldn’t have to deal with such issues – but in the world as it is today, there is a way for manufacturers to come very close to such high levels of field productivity. So let’s introduce the concept and figure out how mobile retail execution software providers like 360 Field Reporting Company LLP, can radically change the efficiency and profit margins for your business, which is important especially in a competitive industry like retail, one of the largest in the country as per Statista.

The Issue with Waste

When a company produces a good and then sells that good to a retailer, they don’t have to worry about waste – because effectively, they only produce as much as retailers would want to buy. But in vertical integration businesses where retail and manufacturing is managed by the same company, the risks of over and under production are very much a real threat. As an example, 11 percent of seafood is lost during production – and a third is lost on the consumer level. The food waste industry alone is near $37 billion in size as per Statista. And it’s not the only wasteful industry,

When a company produces too many goods, the excess simply isn’t bought – not just because people don’t want it, but because it’s hard from a manufacturer’s standpoint to control how well a product will sell, and how efficiently it’ll fly off the shelves. But there is a solution in the form of mobile retail execution technology.

How Mobile Can Change Everything

The big clincher for retailers and manufacturers looking to squeeze every last bit of potential profit out of every single product made, data is the key. Through good, hard data, retailers can adjust the way they stock and promote items, stereotyping and generalizing behavior patterns among consumers until they figure out a system that works best for their specific branch and demographic.

From their, manufacturers know exactly what they need to make in order to sell the highest possible percentage of their produced goods.

But collecting such a large amount of data – also known as big data – is impossible for most businesses. It requires a large existing infrastructure of data collection and automated analysis to best create actionable information, on the basis of which companies and retailers specifically can make sound structural and stocking decisions to benefit their sales.

Mobile eliminates the need for that kind of infrastructure. Through simple mobile data collection, both through the use of mobile customer surveys and field data collection on mobile applications with data shared through a cloud-based network, companies can easily access a wealth a data and add onto it without much of an effort or investment in hardware and data collection technologies. This works especially well considering over 90 percent of US adults have a cell phone, as per Pew Research.

Mobile is the future for retailers looking to find a cost-effective way to make the most of their data.