Are you facing challenges due to disorganized inventory management and inefficient retail audit processes? We know how crucial it is to maintain perfect store execution, measure customer satisfaction, and ensure quality control to succeed in today’s competitive market.
Retail audit is an essential tool for retailers to understand how their stores are performing and how they can improve sales and customer experience. A retail audit is a systematic review of a store’s performance, including sales figures, inventory levels, and customer feedback. It can help businesses and retailers identify areas of improvement, detect inefficiencies, and make data-driven decisions. By performing regular retail audits, businesses can resolve identified issues by taking corrective actions.
In this article, we will explore the advantages of retail audit and how gigification can improve its effectiveness to help you.
Importance of Conducting a Retail Audit
Enterprises can use retail audits as a key tool to make sure that their stores are running as effectively as possible and providing a superior customer experience. These audits comprise a thorough analysis of a retail store’s operation, taking into account factors like organisation, inventory management, and more. Businesses can find areas for improvement, increase compliance, and build best practices that can be carried out across all of their stores by performing routine retail audits.
The discovery of potential improvement areas is one of the key benefits of retail audits. Businesses can identify and address problems like poor product placement, low inventory levels, or inadequate staff training or ineffective marketing strategies with the use of retail audits. These audits give companies insightful data that they may utilise to optimise retail operations.
Retail audits can also help businesses identify which products are working well or not, in the market. Through this, they can focus on the best-selling products, ensure it’s availability in the market for customers and boost sales accordingly. Moreover, with market surveys or consumer interception audits, businesses can also pinpoint areas where customers might be disappointed and address these issues to improve overall customer experience.
How Gigification Can Help Optimize a Retail Audit
The traditional auditing process in the FMCG has challenges and drawbacks of its own. Let’s have a look at some of the most commonly faced pain points by enterprises:
- Fixed Manpower Cost Regardless of Utilization: Throughout the traditional auditing process, the cost of manpower is fixed regardless of how it is utilized. This may result in inefficiencies and resource waste.
- Strong Resistance to customisation of Audits: In the traditional procedure, enterprises find it difficult to customize audits. This may result in audits that are generic and not suited to the unique needs of a company.
- Very Less Actionable Insights Based on Dynamic Observations: Traditional audits may only offer a very small amount of actionable insights. It may be challenging to pinpoint problem areas and implement solutions.
- Highly Inflexible Scale Up and Scale Down: The traditional method might not be adaptable enough to scale up or down according to changing business requirements. This could reduce its efficiency and effectiveness.
- Highly Questionable Quality of Data Due to Lack of Controls & Manual Processes: Traditional audits may rely heavily on manual processes and lack proper controls. The reliability and accuracy of audit findings may be impacted by this since it could result in data with questionable quality.
- Long Setup Times and Long Planning Processes: The typical audit procedure can be time-consuming due to lengthy setup times and planning processes. The release of audit results might be delayed, which may reduce their usefulness.
- Uncertain Ownership of Improvements & Corrections on Audit Findings: In the traditional procedure, ownership of improvements & corrections on audit findings may be unclear. As a result, it can be challenging to implement changes and monitor progress.
Overall, these challenges and traditional pain points highlight the need for a gigified auditing strategy for FMCG that is more adaptable, adjustable, and data-driven.
To overcome these obstacles, many companies are ‘gigifying’ their auditing function to optimize costs and enhance business productivity. ‘Gigification’ can be referred to as the process of breaking down critical work into smaller tasks, thus removing the challenge of talent utilization.
In the context of retail audits, gigification involves collaborating with a pool of skilled auditors (gig workers) who can carry out a retail audit across the supply chain on an on-demand basis.
This approach has become increasingly popular in recent years as companies leverage the gig economy to minimize revenue losses and improve business performance. At Awign, we enable companies to gigify retail audits across the supply chain.
Audits can be either announced or unannounced, with seasonal fluctuations in their frequency and requirements.
How Gigifying Retail Audits with Awign Can Scale Business Performance
Gigification of retail audits can offer businesses numerous benefits. By leveraging Awign’s vast pool of gig workers, businesses can access high-quality audits that cover all areas of the retail process, ensuring comprehensive and accurate results. With end-to-end audit capacity and ownership of output correction, enterprises can take corrective actions based on the insights provided by our gig workforce. It can improve their processes and ensure that they are operating at maximum efficiency.
Additionally, we offer a 100% outcome-based payment model, allowing businesses to pay only for the services they use and scale up or down as needed. At Awign, we believe in ensuring that businesses receive the best possible value for their investment. With over 1.5 million gig workers available 24/7 and covering more than 19,000 pin codes, we enable enterprises to conduct audits quickly and efficiently, improving their operations and profitability.
Our auditing services also offer fraud and error-proof solutions, including full-stack background verification (BGV), tech controls, etc to eliminate errors and fraud. Real-time dashboards and war room teams can help you identify and eliminate errors quickly. By providing actionable insights based on data-driven analysis, gigification can help businesses to identify areas of improvement and implement corrective actions.
Case study: 500 Distributor Warehouses, Mismatches Worth 25 Crore INR, 2 Months!
A leading FMCG player in India needed an efficient and cost-effective solution to measure stock mismatches in multiple distributor warehouses. Awign deployed trained gig workers who conducted audits in 500 distributor warehouses across the country within a week. The gig workers were trained through the Awign app to ensure consistency and accuracy in the audit process. The audit process identified stock mismatches worth 25 crore INR within two months, which helped the client to identify areas of improvement and take corrective action. The project was 25% cheaper than the in-house cost, resulting in cost savings for the client.
In conclusion, conducting a retail audit is crucial for businesses to optimize operations, efficiency, increase compliance, and identify areas for improvement. Gigification can be a cost-effective solution for your enterprise to perform on-demand audits by collaborating with skilled gig workers. At Awign, we gigify the core business operations including accurate retail audits, helping them stay ahead of the cut-throat competition. Get in touch with us today at sales@awign.com to know more!
