This article first appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of The Record.

With increasing pressure from online competitors, brick-and-mortar retailers must increasingly place the shopper’s perspective at the heart of their execution strategies. They must identify how best to deliver a compelling experience in store to keep customers passing through their doors.

Dassault Systèmes’ ‘Perfect Shelf’ industry solution experience based on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, allows users to create an immersive, virtual 3D store environment and view ideas from a shopper’s perspective. The objective is to enable users to design new retail experiences, at a much faster speed, and improve staff performance while remaining compliant.

‘Perfect Shelf’ allows users to build store environments and navigate them as if they were a shopper, and appreciate how merchandising shifts with customer expectations. Furthermore, the solution allows for increased engagement with global or field sales teams, and lets users create virtual designs and envisage how best to introduce effective merchandising to a store.

Users can think in terms of categories and consumer tastes, and can introduce business plans in context. Ultimately, the solution helps improve decision-making, as brands or retail segments can be better placed and presented within a store.

The 3D environment within ‘Perfect Shelf’ allows designs to be quickly adapted based on trends and commercial performance. The environment supports collaboration between designers and stakeholders.

The solution is available both on-premise and on the cloud, offering users quick access to the tools they need to be very efficient. Using Perfect Shelf via the cloud also helps centralise important data while keeping it secure, and allows all team members to connect to the solution regardless of their device – all in real time, from any location, on a 24/7 basis. This enables deeper working relationships thanks to a shared and dedicated collaborative space in the cloud.

Users can access all necessary data, and get a real-time overview of project elements. Projects can be worked on more coherently, and the number of physical meetings can be reduced.

Ultimately, when retailers are looking to introduce a change, they must consider how they will effectively drive that change throughout their entire organisation. The ‘Perfect Shelf’ solution helps supports the execution of change within a business or across a retail chain.

A shopper who feels the store experience has been ‘built for them’ will likely return, while retailers want to be able to deliver this experience in a leaner, more efficient way. The ‘Perfect Shelf’ industry solution experience is the perfect enabler for this.

Marc Truffault is CPG-RETAIL industry solution experience senior manager at Dassault Systèmes

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