MAY-Foods, being a major tea and coffee supplier needs to always control goods layout and availability in retail networks. MAY-Foods employs a team of merchandisers that visit all points of sale where MAY-Foods products are sold on a daily basis.

Merchandisers have to regularly audit the goods supplied by the company and communicate with the store teams on whether the products are in stock. A MAY-Foods merchandiser has to visit about 10−15 points of sale per day, including major retailers and small privately owned shops. A comprehensive audit should be conducted on site, including product layout control, picturing the shelves, and filling out the report on a certain point of sale.

A merchandiser should note the product layout, its quantity, availability, and other shelf placement criteria. Besides, MAY-Foods auditors also function as salesmen: create new orders and communicate with store managers. A comprehensive motivation system takes into account a number of criteria: the number and complexity of trips, timeliness of such trips and quality of the reporting provided, increased number of orders received from stores, MAY-Foods product line expansion, etc.

The audit included a standard offline process with paper document management, and filling out multiple forms, surveys, and reports. The documents contained data on a dozen of brands and a great variety of products, which, naturally, slowed down work. Filling out a large number of paper documents and routine led to multiple problems:

• errors in reports;
• lacking signatures and pictures;
• delays in data provision.

The audit department management recorded violations and abuses on a regular basis: duplicated reports, false reports with no audit. The work scope was not performed in full, about half of visits and audits were false, i. e. never happened in reality. Product layout also left much to be desired, which impacted sales and new orders.

Conducting analytics was our first step, taken even before product development started. The Digex Co. team started with “field observation”, looked into functional responsibilities and real actions of MAY-Foods merchandisers during audit. Also, they surveyed merchandisers and store employees.
Digex Co. explored the process and offered an end-to-end solution including the following:

• Mobile audit application for iOS and Android;
• Audit web app duplicating the mobile app functionality;
• Administration web app to manage the system and control auditors in the field;
• Integration of the developed mobile and web apps with the central accounting system of the company.

Such an IT solution aimed to replace the existing paper workflow - long and mundane - with a transparent and easy to manage digital business process.

It took us about half a year to develop all the components, followed by a 4 month pilot in certain test districts of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The pilot was a success: the apps worked well, and accelerated merchandising audit, ensured 100 % control and transparency of the process.

The mobile app from Digex Co. became publicly available in Google Play and AppStore in 2018 and was adopted by all MAY-Goods auditors all over the country.

The Audit Process
A merchandiser starts a day by logging in to the mobile app and receiving a list of POS s/he needs to audit. A daily route usually consists of 10 to 25 stores. Every store is displayed on a map and is registered in the system.

When a merchandiser enters the store, s/he turns on the app and starts the audit: checks product layout, makes pictures, communicates with the store teams about future SKU orders.

During the audit, the merchandiser fills in pre-approved questionnaires in a mobile or web app. Should there be any questions regarding merchandising rules or standards, an audit knowledge base is there to help. It contains trainings, templates, and practical examples to assist merchandisers. The knowledge base describes product layout rules, and communication strategies with the store personnel.

When inspection is over, the merchandiser accepts the filled-in questionnaires, and submits them via a mobile or web app, then creates a route to the next store. This continues until a daily plan is completed.

There is a number of ways to ensure credibility of questionnaires and audit results:

• Adding pictures to the forms as a kind of visual verification;
• Verifying metadata of the pictures attached to questionnaires;
• Monitoring data by device geolocation;
• Verifying metadata of the device used to fill in the audit report.

Transparency and manageability
Audit results along with all the reports are submitted to a server where they are available in an admin interface, where you can also download the reports and edit user roles, assigning supervisors to certain locations.

Administrators and audit department managers have access to all the reports and information about every visit to the store. An admin web app provides detailed statistics on every operation and every device used by merchandisers:

• Duration of a session,
• OS version and add-ins,
• Geolocation,
• Time zone setup,
• Fill-in frequency of a certain questionnaire,
• and other metadata.

The administrative workspace has an advanced survey editor to customize survey and report forms depending on the region, employee role, and retail specifics. The audit department management assign scores to the auditors in the field for the surveys completed. At the end of every working day, KPIs are recorded to calculate a monthly bonus at the end of the month.

The system accelerated merchandising audits greatly and ensured their 100% credibility. On average, each merchandiser now audits 40% of stores more every day. Audit performance increased, and so did the earnings, in line with the growing KPIs.

Data integrity and transfer rate
In this project, Digex Co. developers achieved two goals: speedy audit report delivery and 100% integrity and credibility of data. Geographically distributed and remote location of many stores impacting connection quality was a major issue. Only a few stores boasted high-rise location and availability of 4G. Walls, basements, and concrete flooring, as well as generally poor quality of mobile Internet connection in remote locations were taken into account by the IT solution developers.

Documents and survey forms were downloaded to a local device when Internet connection was available. Pictures and filled in forms were also saved locally to be submitted to the server the moment the device got online. Digex Co. developers optimized data delivery processes to avoid lack of data even with poor Internet connection and ensure swift registration of data in the central MAY-Foods accounting system.

Abuse Control
Digex Co. team actively supported and upgraded the implemented IT solution to digitalize store audit. When any issue arose, they analyzed every case that was out of the ordinary carefully: monitored the situation, established remote connections to see what the issue was, etc.

Abuse control was one of the frequent tasks they had to perform. Despite the electronic system to make work fast and easy, the human factor was still there, when filling forms and reports. Merchandisers were active gadget and smartphone user and tried to use 3d party PO to cheat:

• Used software that masked the time zone and location to meet the audit deadline;
• Tried to copy text and pictures to duplicate reports and reduce the number of trips;
• Used cracked 3d party software to automatically fill in questionnaires without actually going to a store.

Digex Co. team examined all such violations carefully and patched the apps quickly. For instance, the application constantly watched time zone and location change when data were submitted. We set up triple location monitoring: the system quickly pinged the GPS system of a mobile device three times to make sure no software was used to mask location. The system automatically warned the auditor if they were suspected of an abuse or a violation as per statistics. Different scenarios were adopted for different types of violations: from email notifications to withholding bonus payments in case of repeated failures.