Fixture Maintenance in Retail

Let’s assume that you are standing in a mall facing two stores with same name & contents & the only difference is its façade. Façade of store A is transparent, clean & scratch less, however, other (B) has shabby & unclean one. There are more chances of you to enter in store A with clean façade. This happens because your subconscious mind has triggered a positive perception for store A in comparison to store B. This positive perception is due to distinguishable visibility difference in quality of two stores. Now when person has entered store A then likeliness of selling the product are higher in comparison to store B. This shows that fixture quality plays an important role in silent selling.

All fixtures have a shelf life basis quality of material use & depreciation rate. Within few months from installation, requirement of maintenance impulses in retail outlets. Few brands consider their responsibility to maintain its fixture & follows a maintenance process for the rectification. Now that we have understood the importance of fixture maintenance in stores let’s talk about the process.

There are two different processes used by brands for the fixture maintenance.

Reactive Maintenance:

As the name suggests reactive maintenance starts with escalation of an issue by retailer. Retailer escalates the issue to brand stake holders/sales representatives or marketing team. It is then forwarded to respective vendor partner who have the speciality to handle those types of issues. Vendor will then rectify the issue post visiting the outlet & will bill the expense to brand.

Proactive Maintenance:

This type of activity works as preventive method before escalation of the issue by retailer & helps in effective channel engagement. Process involve visiting an outlet proactively & checking the status of fixtures basis checklist & addressing the issues wherever found.

There are few brands which uses both type of activity. Generally, proactive maintenance is done on Key outlets & reactive maintenance is done for Key & non-key outlets both. There could be hundreds of elements used in the different fixtures due to which one should have a BoM ready for the activity to avoid multiple approvals & discussion between brand & vendor partner.

Generally four types of category of elements used in stores during maintenance:

• Hardware Elements: Few examples of these elements are hinges, door locks, drawer channels, studs, leveller, door handles.
• Electrical Elements: Tube lights, spot lights, strip lights, chowk, adaptors, cob lights, panel lights, wires are the different examples of electrical elements.
• Acrylic elements: Acrylic sandwich panels, wall bays, instore flanges, logos, acrylic letters, tag lines with acrylic letters are few example of acrylic letters
• Glass elements: Toughened glass for façade, glass for front counter or back-wall, glass for table top etc are few examples of glass elements.

These elements have different specifications, brand names, variety & usage. For instance, door locks can be of 10-12 different types & one should have the BOM for all those required elements. To avoid this hassle brands should collate all the data of installed elements before installation of fixtures for the first time in stores. This data can be collated with the help of manufacturing vendor partners.

Recce cost includes 30% of the total maintenance cost brands can save on this cost by following below methods:

• Asset recce database: Most of the brands have their eyes & ears on ground in the form of their field teams. Brands should make a process to collect the asset recce database & periodic changes in it will help in saving the cost of recce.
• Installed fixture database: Collecting the specification of elements used in fixtures directly from manufacturer will help in creating a data base at brand’s end. This data will consist specifications & measurement of all the elements used in fixtures at the time of manufacturing & will help in rectification of the issues without incurring the recce cost.

We at Channelplay, help brands in maintaining the quality of fixtures by rectifying the issues. This helps brands in increasing the operating life of the fixtures. Please feel free to contact us, in case you need more information on this.