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In an industry with such tight margins, grocery store managers seeking a competitive advantage are looking to Point of Sale (POS) data analytics to make better decisions. However, if you’re only looking at what’s happened in your store in the past, you’re missing a big part of the picture. There’s a lot more you can do when you have data available in real time to help you make decisions on the fly.

In today’s competitive retail grocery environment, razor-thin margins mean most grocery managers are looking for any advantage they can get. Installing electronic shelf labels (ESL) can offer retailers a significant technological advantage, yet relatively few grocery stores are using them.

In an era characterized by constant technological change and frequent disruption, it can be difficult to take a moment, step back from daily grind, and reflect on where you've been and how far you've come. But doing so is essential to charting a path to your future success.

Over the past 10 years, grocery retail back-office solutions have experienced unprecedented digital transformation. Let's take a look at what's changed, the effect it’s had on operations, why it represents progress, and how it has created new business opportunities.

Retail risk management is identifying areas of risk in your grocery operations, then mitigating or eliminating those risks to protect your customers, business, and bottom line. The risks that face grocers run the gamut from data security, to the health and safety of customers and employees, to inventory loss prevention.

A National Retail Federation study shows retailers lose about $50 billion in inventory theft every year. And while you might assume the bulk of this is from external customer shoplifting, at least 30 percent—roughly $15 billion—is actually from employee theft. And that doesn’t even include outright cash theft.

We’ve focused our recent posts on the topic of margin management — ways to help you minimize costs and maximize profits. We’ve provided tips, tricks and technologies retail grocers can use to insulate profit margins in the age of the dollar store and protect against the damage of product recalls, and even delved into the benefits of moving into the digital future with electronic shelf labels.

Lately, we’ve focused our posts on tips, processes and techniques your retail grocery business can use to minimize cost and maximize profits, what’s known as margin management. We’ve looked at how you can optimize the types and quantities of prepared foods in your store,  examined ways you can avoid unnecessary waste caused by product recalls, and dug into how electronic shelf labels can help improve your margins and what they’re going to cost.

The theme of our blog the past few weeks has been grocery margin management. While a number of these articles focused on addressing specific situations, last week we started a list of some potentially overlooked techniques and technologies to help you improve or, at least protect, your bottom line.

Simply put, margin management is the practice of minimizing costs to maximize profit. And if you can’t make a profit, why stay in business? That’s why we’ve focused our recent posts on this topic. We’ve provided tips, techniques, and technologies retail grocers can use as part of their strategy to protect and improve their margins. For example, how to minimize waste due to product recalls,  to optimize the types and quantities of prepared foods, how to save on labor costs with electronic shelf labels, and much more.

Over the past few weeks, we have focused our articles on various tips, processes, and technologies which, when used as part of a retailer’s margin management strategy, can help you protect your bottom line. We’ve described ways to use data to optimize a prepared food strategy, trim unnecessary waste due to product recalls, even protect profit margins against the invasion of the dollar stores.