Digital assistance systems and AI turn freelance staff into perfectly orchestrated performance marvels.

The Munich-based company plentyco* is the preferred service partner of leading FINTECH providers for ensuring the optimal brand presence of their products at the point of sale in the DACH region.

With 50 employees, the cross-channel management experts at plentyco* focus on

  • optimizing point-of-sale performance and the supply chain
  • transforming the PoS into a customer sales success and a brand experience for end consumers

Since the company was founded, plentyco* has placed 90 million products on the DACH market. The Munich merchandising experts hold market leadership in the distribution of gift cards and the stocking of gift-card displays, for customers such as Google Play and other leading brands from Silicon Valley.

Delivering excellent POS service with high-quality results – including acquisition, promotion, stocking/inventory maintenance, and mystery shopping – across more than 10,000 points of sale is a sales-strategic and technical art that only a few players master.

The challenge

Until 2013, the plentyco* promise of excellent PoS sales performance was delivered by large merchandising teams under significant operational challenges:

  • 200 merchandisers received the guidelines for constantly changing customer-specific requirements on paper by postal mail
  • PoS activity was recorded by hand on paper; the logs were returned to plentyco* headquarters by post and transferred into MS Excel with a great deal of time and staff effort

Consequences of the analog workflow: high error frequency, inefficiency, lack of transparency

  • High susceptibility to errors led to a high error rate
  • No control over workflows, data quality, and implementation of the planograms
  • No up-to-date project status – no current reports available for customers
  • High time and cost expenditure

The solution

  • Digitalization of PoS management through a mobile merchandising app and a backend for setting up the customer-specific surveys that are assigned to the merchandisers
  • Merchandisers find their assignments as digital checklists per PoS to work through in the plentyco* app; data is captured digitally and enables same-day analyses
  • Checks are carried out on a random-sample basis via the plentyco* backend
  • The tailored adaptation of the workflows, the high performance of the backend, and the app’s offline function made our software solution preferable to benchmark industry software solutions

Benefits

  • Processes can be digitally adapted and rolled out with the highest degree of individualization to customer needs
  • The high sources of error and the resulting error rates were reduced to almost 0, with massive cost and time savings
  • Transparency through digitalized processes enables automated, exact billing of merchandiser performance
  • Complete control over the implementation of the surveys, the workflows, and the data quality
  • The result is consistently high-quality outputs in the projects, optimization of the supply chain, and same-day project reports for clients – in sum, the maximization of customer value