Decide how often to go on a field visit rather than going on them on a regular basis.
Match Visits to Product Cycle Length
Fast-moving products need more regular checks than slow-moving lines. If your product turns over weekly, a monthly field visit will miss gaps, pricing errors, and compliance failures that have already cost you sales. Therefore, the visit schedule needs to be mapped against the product cycle length and how quickly conditions on shelf can change.
High-Footfall Locations Need More Attention
There is a huge scheduling difference between a flagship city-centre store and a rural branch. High-traffic stores are constantly experiencing a high amount of replenishment activity, display activity, and competitor activity. Therefore these stores require a high amount of visits, whilst quieter rural stores require less.
Build Extra Visits Around Promotional Windows
However, every promotion also creates a risk. As mentioned before, displays can be put up late, prices can be entered incorrectly into the system and stock can run out earlier than expected. Therefore, it is advised to make a field visit before and after a promotion. This way problems can be identified on time.
Follow the Seasonal Trading Calendar
Use Retail sales data published by the ONS (such as to the ONS’s retail sales releases which highlight the seasonal peaks that stores face and lead to stock crises and other compliance failures) to plan in the busiest periods of the year in advance of them. By planning the scheduled retail field visits to the stores to take place prior to these busy trading periods, the store will have been checked prior to the chaos of the peak trading periods and any issues will have been picked up in advance of any potential problems.
Use Anomalies as Unplanned Visit Triggers will be a signal that something is now happening on the ground that needs to be investigated.
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A timely visit will reveal problems early, but a late visit will only confirm that you were blind to a problem.
