Planogram – Effective tool for Visual Merchandising

Recent trends shows tremendous growth in the organize retail in India. Don’t want to blindly believe in me? The statistics also prove the tremendous rise - Organized retail is expected to grow from 5-6 per cent to 14-18 per cent of the total retail market by 2015.

Did you also realize that our shopping practice has also changed? Instead of asking for goods, we “Choose” what we want to buy and then “Pay” for the goods. This requires “Planned efforts” by store owners to arrange the goods in such a way that goods can be “Pushed” to customers resulting in “intuitive” shopping.

Planogram is one such tool which helps in the same.

What is Planogram?

A planogram is a diagram that shows how and where specific retail products should be placed on retail shelves or displays in order to increase customer purchases

It is believed that customers is in some mental “Thought” while buying goods and if we Push proper good at “That” time, this can result in “ Sale”. The chances of sales of Tetra pack of Milk increases when it is displayed immediately next to/ close to Cornflake shelf. Vegetables and fruits are not stored immediately at the entrance as customer tendency is to spend more time buying the same. “Easy Picks” SKU’s are displayed / placed at the counter to “Push” sales.

IT tools for Planograms:

Planograms is not an as easy as it sounds. It requires lots of experience and Logic in “Planning” Visual merchandising. The importance and “need” of planograms have resulted in various Planogram soft wares that assists store manager to create Planograms.

Few tools are with basic feature having drag and drop features that allows store manager to Draw/ Create Planogram. While certain advance tools accept Store Parameters, allows users to select item details and generates “Suggested” Planogram based on predefined algorithm/ Logic The Basic tools can be used by stores equipped with expert resources in store management/Planogram while certain stores which lacks expertise in Planogram can use the advanced ones.

And if you have capacity to send some more money then we also have tools that convert any file to a planogram in your required format.

Advantages:

• Selling Potentials is created for every square foot of space available in the stores

• Tool optimizing the Visual Merchandising concept.

• Easier to know what products should be on the shelf and their location.

• Able to place more profitable items in leading position

• Provide wide variety to meet consumer demands.

• Makes it easier for consumers to choose by giving shelves a neat orderly look and makes it easier to find items.

• Build “Specific” Brand awareness by maintaining consistency. (Why all big bazzar looks same?)

• Much better marketing through targeted displays 

Planograms are a precise way of presenting new ideas for product placement, testing merchandising principles and understanding optimal inventory. 

About Author:

Saurabh Kane is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: saurabh.k@spluspl.com

HTML5: New Standard for Web Development.

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014  this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardized in 1997.

Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (Web Browsers, Parser etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML4 but also XHTML 1and DOM Level 2 HTML.

Web Development is of at most importance as it is the process of building a website. It comprises of designing, coding, and maintenance. Since Internet started to dominate the world culture, business habit, academic and many other things, it has become a trend and a necessity to own a website. The site is a basic minimum requirement to have a online presence. As online presence also means a functional gains.It is not a choice to have a website.

HTML4, the popular HTML is still mostly used for web programming but it is quickly getting replaced by all new HTML5. HTML4 was introduced in 1999 which makes it a decade old technology and often unsuitable for modern needs. Developed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) together, this attempts to bridge the gap between the web development needs and technology available.

Let us point out to a few new trends which HTML5 has brought forth.

General Differences between HTML5 and HTML4

Following are some of the major characteristics that distinguish HTML5 from HTML4

1. Simplified and Clear Syntax

The syntax in HTML5 is extremely clear and simple as compared to HTML4. One example of this is the DOCTYPE element. In HTML4 the DOCTYPE declaration was too messy and lengthy and used to refer an external source. However in HTML5 DOCTYPE element has been made extremely simple. For instance a mere <!DOCTYPE html> is enough to specify the document type.

2.More Descriptive Schematics

The original goal of HTML was to develop a language that could describe the structure of a document. As the web grew, developers realized that oftentimes they were describing the same types of elements. For example...a header, a footer, nav, articles, sections, etc. HTML5 recognizes where the language has developed and incorporates those elements into the language with new tags for that type of content.

3. Multimedia Elements

HTML5 contains built in support for integrated multimedia files into web page via video and audio tags. Previously, in HTML4, the multimedia content was integrated in web pages via third party plugins such as Silverlight and flash.

4. Accessing User Geographical location

Previously in HTML4, it was an extremely cumbersome task to get the geographical locations of the visitors visiting the site. It was even difficult when the website was accessed through mobile devices. On the other hand, in HTML5 is extremely easy to get the user location. HTML5’s JS GeoLocation can be leveraged to identify the location of the user accessing the website.

5. Client Side storage

In HTML4, in order to store important data on client side, browser’s cache was used. However, that cache is limited and doesn’t support relational storage mechanism. In HTML5, this issue has been addressed via Web SQL database and application cache that can be access via HTML5’s JavaScript interface.

6. Client Server Communication

In HTML4 the communication between the client and server was done through streaming and long polling, since there are no web sockets available in HTML4. On the contrary, HTML5 contains web sockets that allow full duplex communication between clients and servers.

7. JavaScript Threading Mechanism

In HTML4, JavaScript and the browser interface with which user interacts, run in the same thread which affects performance. HTML5 contains JS Web Worker API which allows JavaScript and Browser interface to run in separate threads

8. Browser Compatibility

As mentioned, HTML4 is an established standard for developing browser applications and has been in use for more than 10 years. For this reason, HTML4 is compatible with almost all web-browsers. On the other hand, HTML5 is still in the process of evolution and the currently available tags are being modified and also new tags are being added. Therefore, HTML5 lags behind HTML4 in terms of compatibility with the browsers.

HTML5 comes with some major improvements. Some of them are as follows.

• HTML, CSS, DOM and Javascript based new features.
• Improved image, video and audio handling.
• Self dependent error handling.
• Device independent setting enabling universal access
• Scripting is replaced using markups

HTML5 Browser Support

Often We have seen that our effort has no any value, when the browser doesn’t support the element of HTML5. Somehow most of the updated browsers are supporting the HTML5 element, But still this is a huge problem for individuals to play with HTML5 on all of Internet browsers.

At the initial stage of HTML5 development very few browsers were able to display the data properly. But now by dint of days and nights toil of various HTML5 development platforms, the most updated browsers are supporting HTML5 tags or elements.

Still the main issue with Internet Explorer, which is suffering from not proper rendering. Although Microsoft has lunched the 11th version also, and a working draft has been introduced of 12th version also. But still HTML5 is running with more advance features and that’s not compatible with old browsers.

Below is chart showing the ratings for HTML5 browser compatibility or support

HTML5 Best Practices

• Minimize HTTP requests a)CSS Sprites b)Image Mapping c)Inline Images
• Add Expire Use of content delivery network(CDN).
• ES or  cache-controlled header
• Style sheets on the top and Scripts at the bottom.
• Avoid CSS expressions
• Make JavaScript and CSS external file
• Reduce DNS lookup
• Minify JavaScript and CSS files
• Avoid redirects
• Avoid nested tables
• Preload Components
• Reduce the number of DOM elements
• Minimize the usage of the  number of Iframes
• Make Ajax cacheable

The technology is evolving as well, From the static webpages built in HTML, now we are having responsive websites, which can reshape itself intelligently depending on the devices which are fetching them, built using "fluid grid technology

These Improvements are huge and when implemented fully, these are expected to change the way the web development is done. As most of the companies are adopting and welcoming the new technology. We can surely hope for a better future which a cumulative effort can bring

HTML5 is an emerging standard of web development which is getting quickly popular among web developers and users alike. The inbuilt features make it much more suitable to address the needs of present day computing which is not well handled by old HTML4.

About the author:

Milind Bibodi is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at milind.b@spluspl.com

SharePoint 2013 – Cross Site Publishing

What is Cross-Site Publishing?

Cross-Site Publishing  is the process of show the content from authoring Site Collection  and display that content in publishing site. Where content exists in authoring site collection and content displayed on publishing site collection.

NOTE:  To make Team Site as publishing site,  do the following.

You can activate two features on team site:

1. SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure (site collection scope)

1. SharePoint Server Publishing (web scope)

Why Cross-Site Publishing?

The Cross-Site Publishing feature is introduced in SharePoint 2013.The  Concept of  CSP(Cross Site Publishing) is, if we have one or more authoring site collections (stored content) and one or more publishing site collections to show authoring site collections content. This approach is called as Cross-Site Publishing. Authoring site collections contains content such as lists, libraries, catalogs and this content is tagged with metadata. These catalogs are indexed by search system (at the time of performing crawl, this crawl will be  full, incremental or continuous crawl) and made available to the publishing site collection. Using search webparts  we had to retrieve the content from authoring site collection to publishing site collection.

Implementation of Cross-Site Publishing

Create at least two site collections – authoring site collection called ‘Authoring’ where content exists and publishing site collection called ‘publishing’ where content will be published.

Turn on Cross Site Collection Publishing(XSP) feature on authoring site collection.

Make sure that you are a site collection administrator on the site collection which contains the list/library.

On the top-level site of the site collection,

Go to Settings -> Site Settings.

On the Site Settings page, in the Site Collection Administration section, select Site Collection Features.

On the Site Collection Features page, next to Cross-Site Collection Publishing, Select Activate.

Activate Cross Site Publishing feature on authoring site collection

To enable a list/library as a catalog, follow these steps.

Open the site, which has lists/libraries for make it as catalog content.

On the top-level site of the site collection

Go to Settings -> Site Contents

On Site Contents Page, Browse for the specific library for make it as catalog.

Under List tab, Go to List Settings and click on Catalog Settings.

On the Catalog Settings page, in the Catalog Sharing section, select Enable this library as a catalog check box.

In the Catalog Item URL Fields section, in the Available fields box, select only the ID field that uniquely identify an item in the library or list for URL navigation, and then click Add.

Now, Catalog Settings for list/library is set.

After these catalog settings for lists/libraries,

We had to to do a FULL/ INCREMENTAL/CONTINUOUS CRAWL.

NOTE:- If for any list/library “Make this library as a catalog” option is disable, then go to Advanced Settings page, and then in search section, change it to Yes.

To perform a Crawl, follow these steps

Go to SharePoint Central Administration, and then select Application Management.

Under Application Management section, In the Service Applications, Select Manage service Applications.

In Service Applications Page, Click on “Search Service Application” in the Column “Type”.

In the Search Administration, on left hand side, Under Crawling Section,

Select “Content Sources”

On the content sources page, “Local SharePoint Sites” Content source is there. If you are to started full crawl then, click on “Start Full Crawl”/”Incremental Crawl”.

Once the Full Crawl is done on the search content source then we can see the catalog setting enabled list into Managed catalog Connection settings of the site collection.

Now, we can implement Cross - Site Collection by do the following.

Go to Publishing Site Collection, Under site settings -> Managed catalog connection.

Now, Click on Manage Catalog Connections[Site Settings -> Catalog Connections] . All available catalogs will be listed here. Click on ‘connect’ next to the catalog you want to publish.

Configure the connection details. Select the tagging field, choose navigation settings and fields to be included in the URL.

Add a web part page in Pages library or any other library and insert a Content Search web part. Configure it to display contents from the shared catalog(with catalog URL).

Links and downloads:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/02/20/stage-1-create-site-collections-for-cross-site-publishing.aspx

About the author:

Milind Bibodi is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at milind.b@spluspl.com

Understanding BPMS technology

Business process management suite or (BPMS) is a methodical approach to constructing an organization's workflow more operational, more proficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. It is a set of well-understood, cohesive technologies which permit industries, governments and businesses to build applications that combine models of new or present functions. It basically emphases on refining corporate performance by managing and optimizing a company's business procedures. It can thus be labelled as a "process optimization process."

One remarkable characteristic of cultivating a process culture in the organization is that process contributors are able to comprehend in what way their work affects the value chain and value delivery to clients. This can help them visualize how an end-to-end business process provides value to clients as well as how business processes are interrelated. The higher the magnitude of transparency offered by the BPMS approach, the more employees will be encouraged to comprehend how to improve processes.

What is a Business Process Repository – This warehouse can stock dynamic collection of procedures and allow changes to them without the requirement to manage each change yourself. The Business Process Management Suit can basically be integrated with other software, where numerous applications are involved, the interaction between the workflow and applications can be simplified through BPMS. The business process repository can stock process models, procedures and metadata about processes to enable re-use of process components.

Difference between BPM and ERP

Basically Business Process Management (BPM) is a practice while Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is one of the numerous technologies that can support that practice. The Beauty of BPMS is that you can manage processes across dissimilar systems, applications and repositories outside the span of your ERP system. The fundamental principal of BPMS is to focus on enhancing the efficiency of the current business processes.

There are few critical components of a BPM Suite:

• Process engine – is integrated into BPMS to manage effective automation. It is a medium for modeling and implementing process-based applications.
• Business analytics — it enables managers to detect business problems, trends and styles, and opportunities and respond accordingly.
• Content management — this manages unstructured data and information, enables storage of electronic documents, images, and other files.
• Collaboration tools — it helps to remove intra - and inter departmental communication barriers with the help of forums, dynamic workspaces, and message boards.

Technology trends shaping Business Process Management

1. Big data

Big data is an intricate set of information, It is being used in diverse industries to target the right customers’ and make complicated predictions surrounding business decisions.

It can make procedures more competent, which would eventually improve profitability of the company as a whole.

Big Data is the new buzz word

2. Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has been one of the biggest technological developments in recent years. Companies can stock large volume of data without having to purchase and store hard drives. This not only advances productivity, but also aids flexible working, which can help reduce costs for organizations in the long run.

Work from anyplace, anytime

3. Mobile

The rise of the smartphone and the tablet computer businesses have drastically changed the approach in which they interact with those they are doing business with.

Mobile communication implies engaging with customers instantly

4. Social Media

Social media is extremely significant for businesses, exclusively those with a customer-facing side.

Customers are under the perception that social media is a key mean for them to contact brands with reviews and complaints, and responding can be hugely favorable.

Is social media the leading thing to evolve from the internet?

An effective process implementation can help to streamline and improve processes.

About the author:
Gurpreet Kaur Gaga is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: gurpreetkaur.gaga@spluspl.com

IT Procurement

In continuously evolving technology world, IT plays an important role in the growth of a company. Organizations have to rely on IT to maintain a competitive edge in the market. Hence, IT procurement becomes very important. IT procurement can be divided into two parts viz. IT hardware procurement and IT software procurement. There are various factors that should be taken into consideration while doing any IT procurement. Any errors / flaws can result into heavy losses, not only in monetary terms but also in terms of organizational reputation and brand value. Thus, it can be seen that IT procurement process is very important and vital.

Various factors that should be taken into consideration while doing IT procurement are as listed below:

1. Experienced and efficient procurement team
2. Objective of the organization
3. Analyzing existing IT infrastructure
4. Requirement
5. Benefits
6. Vendor selection

1. Experienced and efficient Procurement team: First and very important step towards IT procurement process is to have an experienced and efficient procurement team. This is important as this team will be responsible for end to end successful and efficient IT procurement. Procurement team will make sure that precise IT procurement is done which will contribute towards overall organizational growth and success.

2. Objective of the Organization: It is very important to understand the organizational objective as any procurement that is done should be aligned and in favor of achieving that objective. Thus, if any procurement is aligned with the organizational objective it results in success of the organization.

3. Analyzing existing IT infrastructure: Before planning for any IT procurement, one needs to understand the existing system and IT infrastructure thoroughly. This will help to identify exact IT software / hardware that needs to be procured which would be compatible with the existing architecture and which would give maximum value for money.

4. Requirement: This is a very important factor as the success of the procurement depends on it. If the requirements are not properly analyzed and identified then the result would be devastating. Huge amount of money is utilized in IT procurement and if it is not fully satisfying the requirements then it is a failure and waste of resources, time and money for the organization. Hence, a separate phase should be implemented for requirement gathering from the required stakeholders and analysis so that while going ahead with procurement organization is clear what exactly they are looking for which would satisfy the requirements accurately.

5. Benefits: After understanding the requirements it is very important to understand the benefits in terms of return on investment (ROI). Thus, it is important to identify benefits and analyze if they are aligned with the organizational goals and objective. Stakeholders can specify various benefits from their point of view on the requirements provided by them. However, it is important for the procurement team to identify the benefits and requirements that are aligned with Organizational benefits and not for individual comfort and convenience.

6. Vendor Selection:  After performing all the above mentioned steps, vendor selection phase should be executed. This phase includes identifying appropriate vendor. There are various factors that should be considered based on which a vendor can be selected. Some of them are as listed below:

• Background of the Vendor
• Clienteles
• Expertise in the required domain
• Reviews for the clients it has provided solutions
• Is it complied with various IT and quality controls
• Location and branches
• Budget

Thus, it can be seen that IT procurement holds great importance in accomplishing overall organizational goals and objectives. Hence, it is very important to follow all the above mentioned steps to execute a successful IT procurement.

About Author:

Amol Bhembre is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: amol.b@spluspl.com

The Use Case Technique: Mapping effective interaction with the system

In systems engineering, use cases are used at an advanced level than within software engineering, often demonstrating missions or stakeholder goals. The comprehensive requirements may then be captured in Systems Modelling Language or as predetermined statements.

Business analyst should try to extract requirements through use cases. A method should be defined to capture user requirements.Use cases originated from object-oriented world, which applies to general requirements analysis. BA’s should ask stakeholders questions focusing on actual, but abstracted, usage scenarios. The questions should be like “Describe a goal you wish to accomplish with the system” and not “What do you expect the system to do.?” The arrangement of actor’s actions and the response of the system should be written properly which would help in deriving functional requirement and enable to create a tests from the use cases.

There are three levels of software requirement that are used to map different echelons of stakeholder, user and actual functional requirement of the system.

Business Requirement:

Business requirements are what must be delivered to provide values. Products, systems, software, and processes are the ways how to provide, satisfy, or meet the business requirements. Requirements such as benefits of the product,different business rules, HR policies, local policies and security policy which are captured in the vision and scope document helping in resolving the ‘why’ questions by the business and the stakeholders.

Confusion arises for three main reasons.

1. A common practice is to refer to objectives, or expected benefits, as 'business requirements.' 
2. People commonly use the term 'requirements' to pertain to the features of the product, system, software expected to be created.
3. A widely held model says these two types of requirements differ only in level of detail or abstraction—wherein 'business requirements' are high-level and vague and decompose into product, system, or software requirements that are detailed.

Such confusion can be avoided by recognizing that business requirements are not objectives but rather meet objectives when satisfied.

User Requirement:

The user requirement specification is a document which is usually used in software engineering that states what the user expects the software to be able to do.Business analyst need to emphasize more on the business rules and quality attribute (scalability, maintainability, performance) the system should display to the user. This document explains what the users want to do or what they want to accomplish with the system.

Once the required information is completely gathered it is documented in a user requirement specification, which is meant to spell out exactly what the software must do and it becomes part of the predetermined agreement. A customer cannot demand features that are not specified in the user requirement specification, whilst the developer cannot claim the product is ready if it does not meet afeature of the user requirement specification.

Functional Requirement:

In software engineering, a functional requirement sketches the function of the system and its machineries. A function is described as a set of inputs, itsbehaviour, and outputs. BA’s needs to putconcise efforts on the having detailed calculations on technical details, data manipulation and processing and other explicit functionality that define what a system is supposed to accomplish.

Behavioral requirements should also be captured concisely in the use case describing all the cases where the system uses the functional requirements.

Functional requirements are braced by non-functional requirements (also recognized as quality requirements), which enforce limitations on the design or implementation (such as performance, localization, data migration, security and reliability).

Commonly, functional requirements are expressed in the form "system must do", while non-functional requirements are "system shall be". The strategy for implementing functional requirements are mapped in the system design. The strategy for implementing non-functional requirements are mapped in the system architecture.

Benefits from the Use Case Approach:

Use cases are user and task centric approach of implementing the users’ terminology and what the user expects from the system. It helps the BA’s in understanding specific application domain also helps in avoiding building unnecessary functionality that is not required by the stakeholders. It permits early drafting of functional tests and sets implementation priorities on functional requirements.

Appropriate Use Case Applications:

Use cases may or may not work well for each and every project implementation. Below are some of the application for which use case are necessary:

• End-user applications: Banking application, MIS system, different management system etc.
• Web sites: Shopping sites, Internet Banking etc.
• Devices with which users must interact: Android, iOS and Windows mobile applications.

Some of the applications or process for which use case isn’t of much importance:

• Batch processes: Print2Flash.
• Computationally-intensive systems: Operating system.
• Event-driven real-time systems:Real-time Electricity Market.

Two schools of thought:

• Use cases are the functional requirements.
• Use cases disclose the functional requirements

It is very important for Business analysts to map actual requirement to the specified documents. It will help to implement all the business, user and functional requirement while adhering to the agile process. They are also responsible for asking precise questions to the stakeholder and map it into the document and not develop a system that does not meet the end users’ requirements.

About the author:

Varun Shimoga is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: varun.shimoga@spluspl.com