lepton software

Lepton’s exclusive new market for FMCG companies and retail stores

The key difference between FMCG companies and retail stores is inventory. An FMCG store keeps an inventory which can be sold in days. While a retail store might have inventory that lasts for even years! But, the common problem that plagues both these industries is most assuredly supplier networking.

Lepton utilizes location intelligence – the latest artificial intelligence technique of combining location data with market research. Lepton aims to create a smart market – i.e. fully mapped geographical locations containing supplier chain information, cluster descriptions and possible locations for business expansion & field force tracking.  The SmartMarket app is designed to be an integral part of your business strategy, whether it’s in market research, trend prediction, managing field force or even location comparison - and no matter the industry, FMCG or retail, SmartMarket will prevail. 

Retail companies primarily function with a B2B (business to business) model and as such require optimal routes, from suppliers and to clients. FMCG companies on the other hand function as B2C (business to customer) models and require routes from suppliers and additional information about cluster data in the location.

It is extremely clear that the world is shifting to a digital era. With changing customer demands it is crucial for businesses to adapt to this changing world or be left behind entirely! No matter the type of industry, the Lepton SmartMarket provides a comprehensive solution to it all. Imagine the number of man-hours you could save if your supplier had a real-time update of all possible routes. This might seem like a minimal solution. But, when you spread it across your entire market segment - connecting suppliers, FMCG companies and retail stores alike – the effect is enormous. 

FMCG companies utilizing Lepton’s SmartMarket app would notice faster supplier deliveries, quicker turn-around time and a smaller cash flow cycle! A retail store might not much care for faster supplier deliveries as inventory doesn’t play a huge part. However, for retail stores aiming for expansion, SmartMarket can provide detailed cluster insights and even an approximate number of customers in a geographical pin-code. Lepton’s SmartMarket aims to change the way the world looks at marketing and market research. Come join the revolution!

To find out more visit us at http://www.leptonsoftware.com/

Lepton’s exclusive new market for FMCG companies and retail stores

The key difference between FMCG companies and retail stores is inventory. An FMCG store keeps an inventory which can be sold in days. While a retail store might have inventory that lasts for even years! But, the common problem that plagues both these industries is most assuredly supplier networking.

Lepton utilizes location intelligence – the latest artificial intelligence technique of combining location data with market research. Lepton aims to create a smart market – i.e. fully mapped geographical locations containing supplier chain information, cluster descriptions and possible locations for business expansion & field force tracking.  The SmartMarket app is designed to be an integral part of your business strategy, whether it’s in market research, trend prediction, managing field force or even location comparison - and no matter the industry, FMCG or retail, SmartMarket will prevail. 

Retail companies primarily function with a B2B (business to business) model and as such require optimal routes, from suppliers and to clients. FMCG companies on the other hand function as B2C (business to customer) models and require routes from suppliers and additional information about cluster data in the location.

It is extremely clear that the world is shifting to a digital era. With changing customer demands it is crucial for businesses to adapt to this changing world or be left behind entirely! No matter the type of industry, the Lepton SmartMarket provides a comprehensive solution to it all. Imagine the number of man-hours you could save if your supplier had a real-time update of all possible routes. This might seem like a minimal solution. But, when you spread it across your entire market segment - connecting suppliers, FMCG companies and retail stores alike – the effect is enormous. 

FMCG companies utilizing Lepton’s SmartMarket app would notice faster supplier deliveries, quicker turn-around time and a smaller cash flow cycle! A retail store might not much care for faster supplier deliveries as inventory doesn’t play a huge part. However, for retail stores aiming for expansion, SmartMarket can provide detailed cluster insights and even an approximate number of customers in a geographical pin-code. Lepton’s SmartMarket aims to change the way the world looks at marketing and market research. Come join the revolution!

Why is a store locator must for your business?

A few years back, Google came up with the concept of micro-moments. They defined them as the moments where we intuitively turn to our smart-devices to obtain some kind of relevant information that drives our decision for some kind of action. They called these moments the ones that mattered the most for businesses in this information-driven world.

You can think of these micro-moments as critical touch points in the decision-making journey of a consumer. Since consumers can take action to satisfy their needs or curiosities at any given time from any place in the world, it becomes highly imperative for any business to be there in that micro-moment, because this is what will essentially determine if that consumer’s journey ends on your landing page with your product or service.  

You might be thinking that this is all well and good but how is this value adding for my business? How can I ensure that my business is there for the consumer in this critical micro-moment?

Well, keep reading to find out.    

It all starts with a simple Google search. The consumer asks some query and he expects to find an answer. This means that the first essential step for your business is providing visibility to your customer. So, if you are a bank and the customer is looking for some banking information, you would want him to see the branch or ATM which is nearest to him. If you are a restaurant in customer’s vicinity and he is looking for food, you would want him to find the directions to your restaurant. The point of significance here is that your business needs to be “Top of the Mind” as they say and one of the best ways to achieve this is with the help of a store locator.    

A store locator is nothing but a simple functionality which helps your customers in finding the physical locations of your business with ease and convenience. On a macro level, the store locators help in increasing the visibility of your business, improve your search rankings and help in providing local information which is relevant to the consumer in that micro-moment. But on a more micro level, this directly results in increased website traffic and new leads, increased store footfall and increased saving of resources. Both macro and micro benefits eventually help in business optimization.

Consider another use related case where your business is spread across multiple locations. In this case, a store locator can help you optimize operations for your local business branches by providing local search results for a consumer’s query. This kind of location intelligence adds more value to the customer by providing them relevant and useful information that they need while at the same time they help multi-location businesses in customer acquisition/retention as well as business expansion.

In a world where information access has become so easy, it has become challenging for businesses to maintain their superiority because of the ever-increasing competition. The use of the Internet and Google has leveled the playing field and allowed various other competitors to target that same micro-moment of the consumer. This is where location intelligence can prove to be a unique differentiator which can provide your business with the much-needed competitive edge catapulting it to the skies and beyond. Smart Location Intelligence-based solutions can provide important demographic and region based geographical information. Analysis of this kind of data can help the business in figuring out consumer demand, demographic profiling, etc. which eventually helps in making key decisions regarding business expansion. For example, a bank can analyze the demographic information about a particular region before deciding to open a new branch.

 How Can Lepton help your organization?

 With 20 years of leadership in Location Intelligence and Analytics solutions, Lepton software has been helping businesses grow in various industries with informed planning, business expansion, performance, and operation optimization decisions. We are a premium Google Maps partner in India and Lepton has provided solutions to 8 different industries including BFSI, FMCG, and Retail to name a few.

SmartLocator is an out of box innovative solution provided by Lepton software [M1] that is built on Google Maps APIs which allows a business to optimize its physical store and branch location experience for its customers.  With SmartLocator, a business can ensure that It provides locally relevant and useful information to a potential customer. More importantly, it also provides driving directions and clear and convenient routes which can help customers to make a quick decision.

In this information age, one cannot stress enough the importance of being there for your customers at the right moment. Studies have shown that 90% of the smartphone users are not absolutely certain of the brand they wish to try when they start searching. So, if you are there for your current customers, this will only help deepen their loyalty and if you are there for people who are not your customers, it’s a good chance that they might just become your customers. It’s a win-win situation.

Data has long powered modern retail, helping Walmart become a master of supply chain logistics and fueling Kroger’s customer-centric strategy. Artificial intelligence and the cloud are fueling explosive growth in retail big data — and transforming customer marketing. And as the

retail industry moves online and customer digital engagement

is the battlefield, the quality and quantity of data will determine the winners and losers.

This new world requires — more than ever — data discipline. And this is an area that is particularly challenging to smaller retailers and even some regional chains. Data discipline will make or break retail success from this day onward. Here are just a few examples of issues I’ve encountered in talking with retailers:One retailer still had super abbreviated product descriptions that were used years ago with the old (much narrower) receipts. Product descriptions coming from the retailer’s item file are used to power online shopping — abbreviated descriptions just won’t do it for eCommerce as customers won’t understand what the product is.Another retailer’s item file lacked any kind of product categorization on nearly 50% of the products carried. Many retailers lack even somewhat accurate product graphics.

Retailers

with these issues cannot realistically install any kind of marketing personalization capabilities that rely upon product categorization.And yet another well known regional retailer had many products at store-level that were not represented in item files at the headquarters office; i.e. the merchandisers and buyers at the corporate office did not know what products were in the store. This situation is simply frightening; how can a retailer do effective promotion planning, demand forecasting, let alone any kind of optimization, when HQ doesn’t know what products are in each store?Data quality issues like these come back to haunt retailers when they look to deploy new capabilities like online shopping, promotion optimization, or marketing personalization — capabilities that are rapidly becoming a cost of entry to compete. And these are issues with what should be basic levels of data required to operate.Leading retailers are leveraging fast-growing data attributes attached to each individual shopper and each product.The customer identified transaction data is just the beginning as solution providers like Birdzi calculate and maintain hundreds of data attributes for each individual shopper, from brand loyalty scores to discount propensity, and from product purchase frequency to category spending indexes. Add to this third-party data from companies like Experian or Acxiom that provide dozens or even hundreds more data points.Category tags, package sizes, and pricing form the core of product based attributes. Label Insight is using AI and machine learning to deconstruct the handful of nutrition attributes on a package to encompass, dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of additional attributes for any given product. Deep nutritional data attributed to individual products is quickly growing in importance as food is increasingly linked to a shopper’s health condition.The velocity of data is growing as various solutions use real-time shopper location — both inside and outside the store — to provide contextual information. An understanding of the shopper’s intent is provided by a real-time view to what products have just been added to the shopping list, what digital coupons have been clipped, and what products have been searched for.Cloud-based solutions enable regional and smaller retailers to access cutting edge marketing personalization solutions driven by advanced data science to power relevancy across every digital engagement with each individual shopper. The cloud also brings sophisticated pricing, promotion, and product assortment optimization capabilities to retailers cost effectively. But the efficacy of these solutions is directly dependent on the quality and quantity of data feeding them.

Retailers embarking

on data-driven strategies would be well served to first assess the quality of their core data (product descriptions, categorization, pricing, product cost, vendor codes, and more). Retailers with loyalty programs should examine how clean and up to date their customer contact data is along with how customer loyalty IDs roll up to households (this area is particularly vexing as retailers often just distribute cards). Building on a now-solid base, consider bringing in third-party data to permit scoring share-of-wallet by customer household in addition to other attributes that can improve targeting and personalization.Read More :-

When the Maps Platform launched in July 2018, Google held back the Places software development kit (SDK) for Android and iOS. While the other Google Maps APIs received increased quotas and a new pricing model, the mobile Places SDK remained tied to the previous plan’s limit of 150,000 daily requests. Mobile Places developers have not yet been able to take advantage of the Maps Platform’s new capabilities.

On January 29, 2019, Google released new Places SDKs for both Android and iOS to bring them in line with the rest of Places API. The new Places SDKs are now officially part of Maps Platform (the old SDKs are deprecated).

Over the next six months, developers will need to update their apps with the new Places SDKs. Because some code changes will be necessary with this update, Google is giving developers until July 29, 2019, to deploy their updated apps, at which time the old SDKs will stop functioning.

All Places usage on the new SDKs will be billed according to the new Maps Platform pricing model. While Google is covering the cost of mobile Places usage with transition credits until July 29, it is important to update apps as soon as possible.

The new Places SDKs also will be fully supported and covered by the same service level agreement as the rest of the Maps Platform. Mobile usage will combine with JavaScript and web service usage for volume discounts, and Android developers will appreciate that the Places SDK is now independent of Google Play Services, allowing for shorter release cycles and quicker bug fixes. 

Google is making these changes to transition Places from a data service to an API that provides insights and business solutions. By deprecating the old SDKs, freeing the SDK from the Android release cycle and unifying the billing model with the rest of the Maps Platform, Google is setting the stage for continued innovation. Be on the lookout for new Places APIs features coming soon.

Do this next:

1.    Review the migration guides for Android and iOS.

2.    Identify where and how your apps are using the Places SDKs.

3.    Remove Place Picker from your apps. The new SDKs no longer support this functionality, and while it will continue to function during the deprecation period via the compatibility libraries, you’ll need to remove it from your apps prior to July 29, 2019.

4.    Upgrade to the new SDKs.

1.    In the short term, use compatibility libraries to minimize effort.

2.    Over the long term, modify your code to reference the new classes, methods and properties.

3.    Filter fields to minimize costs.

5.    Verify that any API/Cloud Console projects using mobile Places APIs are linked to valid billing accounts.

6.    Roll out the new versions of your apps to the App and Play Stores prior to July 29, 2019, allowing time for administrative approval and user installation.

Lepton Software works with the Google Maps Platform  to ensure your customers get the best possible map experience. Google requires you to register  API key  with your map and an active billing account.If you want to learn more about how lepton Software is using Google Maps Platform and why you need to register your map with Google, please navigate to Your store locator Google Maps License explained.

Create Google API Key First let’s check whether your account has or doesn’t have a key added. Login to your account and go to Google Maps API key tab . If you see an empty field, then check instructions below.Step 1: Sign in to your Google account. If you don’t have one, you’ll have to create it to proceed further.Step 2: Navigate to Google Maps Platform site and press ‘Get Started’Step 3: In the opened window you’ll be asked which API’s to enable. Check all three boxes. and click ‘Continue’Step 4: Then you’ll be asked to create a project or select from existing ones. You can learn about what is a project here. Select your existing project or click on ‘+Create a new project‘ and enter the project name.  Use something that makes sense to you under the project name, e.g ‘Business Name Website’.If you are new to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you may land on Google Cloud Platform start up page. GCP is free, but Google will give you $300 credit / mo during free-trial 12 months so you could use various services available under the platform. After 12 months Google will just decrease this credit and you’ll be receiving $200 credit / mo.Fill into the form and press ‘Agree and continue’Step 5: Enable Billing by clicking on ‘CREATE BILLING ACCOUNT‘.NoteGoogle provides free maps usage quota per month, which in most cases will be more than enough for your business. However, it’s good to set up your budget threshold and billing alerts to avoid unexpected expenses.Check How To Manage Your Google Maps Budget to learn how to avoid unexpected billing from GoogleStep 6: Name your billing account and press ‘Continue‘Step 7: In the opened window choose your country and currency, then click ‘Confirm’Step 8: In the opened form enter your business information and add a payment card to your account.Step 9: Now we need to create an API Key. Click here Step 10: Click on ‘Create credentials’ -> ‘API key’Step 11: That’s it!  Your key has been generated! Copy it, we’ll have to add it to your Lepton Software account in the next step.OPTIONAL BUT A GOOD IDEA: You may want to limit your API key to just your site. Click to ‘RESTRICT KEY’, in the restrictions area choose restriction method (most of our clients are using HTTP referrers). Add *yourwebsite.com/* in the referrers field.Make sure to copy the asterisks and slashes exactly. If you have multiple domains, add them the same way with commas in between.

Add API key to Lepton Software account Login to your Lepton Software account and go to Google Maps API key tab.  Paste created API key in the Google Maps API Key field and press ‘Update API Key’If you created your account earlier than June 2016  you need to re-embed Lepton Software to your page. You can get it from your account dashboard.You can check installation instructions hereYou’re all set now!  Below are optional steps but highly recommended if you want to have more control over your maps usage

Location analytics is the process or the ability to gain insight from the location or geographic component of business data. The Businesses are equipping themselves to dig deeper into the data insights with Location Intelligence Software capabilities. Location Analytics: The Next Big Step in Business Analysis