In today’s fast-paced retail environment, navigating through the challenges of efficient store management — while at the same time enhancing customer experience — can feel like steering through uncharted waters. Thankfully, innovations in retail technology are allowing store owners to be much more efficient in areas like inventory control, sales metrics, and labor management.
In this post, we’ll go over some of these new innovations and outline how they can help you run a more efficient grocery business!
Revolutionize Ordering with Handheld Wireless Devices
Does the thought of manual inventory management send shivers down your spine? We totally get it. The manual inventory process is not just time-consuming it’s also prone to errors, which has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and bottom-line profits.
Imagine having a handheld tool that allows you to streamline your ordering process on a secure, managed platform. This is exactly what you can do with our iUNFI Ordering Device and Mobile Printer wireless devices. With these easy-to-use tools, your entire ordering process will be transformed into an efficient activity that can significantly cut down on hours spent manually checking stock levels and placing orders.
Tackle Shrink Head-On
Shrinkage — the bane of retail profitability — often results from damaged products, theft, or products expiring before they can be sold. Traditional methods of tracking these losses can be cumbersome and reactive rather than proactive. UNFI’s solution? The G.O.T. Shrink & Markdown tool.
This scanning tool provides retailers with easy on-the-go capabilities to track and manage donated, damaged, and expired products. With this kind of visibility into products that are nearing their expiration dates, retailers can strategically mark down items, recovering a portion of the sales that would otherwise be lost to shrink. It’s an innovative approach to an age-old problem, offering retailers a fighting chance against shrinkage!
Streamline Online Order Picking and Shelf Tagging
The e-commerce boom has required retailers to adapt quickly and create a smooth process for fulfilling online orders. However, when items are not strategically sequenced and labeled in the store, it becomes extremely labor-intensive to find items and fill orders before the pickup window.
UNFI’s AisleIQ reduces store labor by creating picking lists in walking sequence for online orders with a simple web-based tool. By directing the most efficient sequence through your store, AisleIQ can save you time and reduce labor costs. It even has built-in color coding to help determine item movement (green = selling well, yellow = average, red = not selling).
Tap Into the Power of Store Sales Metrics
Informed decision-making is the cornerstone of retail success. However, wading through piles of reports to understand sales numbers broken down by item, department, or store can be overwhelming.
PivotalView is a web-based tool that will save you hours of manual report analysis. It empowers managers to engage more effectively, driving sales and informing marketing strategies—all from their mobile devices. The software leverages POS data, advanced analytics techniques, and the latest computing technology to provide current sales information, insights, and even recommendations.
Simplify Pricing with Pre-Defined Files
Finally, let’s talk about the tedious task of manual data entry for pricing. This process can drain the energy of even the most passionate retailer. Fortunately, with UNFI, you can receive pre-defined pricing and reduce the amount of time you spend manually entering data.
The price files cover regular, temporary price reduction (TPR), and ad pricing for UNFI warehouse UPCs. This not only improves profitability and efficiency but also ensures consistency in pricing across the board.
Grocery retailers face so many challenges these days, from managing inventory and reducing shrink to streamlining the online ordering process and making data-driven decisions. UNFI’s suite of tools will help you simplify ordering, track shrink markdown, drive labor savings through efficient shelf tag printing, and get accurate data metrics on sales in your store.
Embrace the future of retail with open arms and focus your energy on what truly matters: enhancing customer service and driving sales. Visit our website to learn more about the retail technology tools we have available or fill out this short form and a member of our team will reach out to you!
