The home furnishing retailing business in India has undergone a sea change quite swiftly. The practice of stocking home furnishing fabrics has been on the wane and most of the retailers carry fabric swatches of different distributors which are shown to the customers who in turn select the fabric and get the exact quantity they require for their operations.

On the other hand as prices of houses has been increasing the amount of disposable income and the desire to make the house practical and trendy as also been on the rise. Hence most owners today engage the services of interior designers and architects to make the most practical use of space and give the home the feel they desire, instead of making it just a place of shelter.

The challenge of retailers while working with a low inventory model is that they are fully dependent on the distributor for their sales. The distributors sometimes do not carry enough stocks on all SKU’s thereby making the retailer cut a sorry figure to the architect or the customer when they finalize a fabric and the said fabric is out of stocks. Retailers are quite finicky on loosing customers to lack of stocks. Moreover sometimes the designers are making the fabric combinations based on color choices and if one fabric is not available then it causes the architect to change the entire plan they made. All these things are quite disconcerting to the retail community as they spend hours on a project getting the stakeholders with the right decision making only to find at the end that the distributors are running out of stocks.

Another challenge over the past year has been the multiple changes in prices of the material due to rise in input costs. Normally the fabric prices saw one or two revisions a year, but over the last year these revisions became too many and that is also a cause of concern as the RRP ( Recommended Retail Price) printed on the swatches require to be covered with fresh stickers of new RRP’s and normally the entire process of printing and dispatch to various retailers. This again is a purely manual process and is full of mistakes as the stickers need to be sorted based on the swatches dispatched to various retailers.

We were tasked with this unique problem which required giving real time visibility of stock availability to retailers and also to cut down on the costs for printing and distribution of RRP stickers.

Our solution comprised of integrating the entire stocks and RRP from the system using unique QR codes.

1. The prices of items and their RRP’s were regularly updated in the distributors application, however the challenge was in getting it printed and then dispatching it

2. We made a small module which would generate a QR code which could for one time be sent over to the retailers and scanning which the lastest prices are displayed to the customers. These QR codes eliminate the need to print the exact RRP of the products on the swatches and need no replacement with price changes. The QR code upon scanning will open a web page which will display the latest prices at all times.

3. Even for inventory we created a QR code system wherein when the retailers scans the QR code they are required to put in the Qty they are looking for and the system can tell them real time about the availability or non availability of the fabric. This eliminated the need to call the retailer or change the plans upon knowing that the fabric is in short supply

4. The easiest part was that these needed no special apps and any smart phone which could scan QR codes was good enough thereby eliminating the need to download a specialized app and making it user authenticated

5. We also offered end to end data encryption with integration of google analytics which helped keep a track of the users and their behaviors and also upon the uptime of the service

We have seen a great acceptance of this module at all retail outlets as it straight away eliminated the need to make calls and keep records of prices and stocks. All information at all times was real time and required no further queries to be answered.