Planograms help make sure that you are selling the right products for your store, allocate the right space to each line, makes the fixture easy to navigate and hopefully gets customers to trade up to more premium products or higher-margin launches.

In my stores we usually relay our fixtures at least once a year – especially impulse categories – helped by manufacturers and our symbol group.

The simplest and easiest way of doing this is to find somebody who is willing to do the relay for you and then let them get on with it, saving you all the time and effort.

However, if you really want a layout that is best suited to your store you need to find a supplier to work with. You should look for one of the market leaders in the category with highly profitable brands, and they should be willing to create tailor-made planograms using your EPoS data and personal input.

If you have it, give them your EPoS data for the fixture and a list of items that you feel could not be discontinued – there may be certain products that have a low rate of sale but you stock for them for a regular customer or it has a higher than average profit margin which gives the same return as a faster-selling line.

You should also try and give a list of lines that you feel could be discontinued – ie products that have a very low profit margin but you would still have other similar flavour or size options available to the customer if you stopped selling it.

When deciding which lines to discontinue always factor in cash margins. A great example from my relay was Rubicon Sparkling Lychee. We stocked cans and 500ml bottles – when looking to cut one of the two you would naturally think to cut the cans as customers would then be forced to trade up. However, when we looked at the average wholesale cost of each product we found the cans usually delivered a much higher cash margin as they were more likely to be on offer with suppliers throughout the year.

Remember, if you are the only store in your area that sells a specific product or variant you can afford to cut the line without losing sales as most customers will usually trade up to the more profitable size if they really want that particular product.

If you don’t have anybody to help you relay a fixture to planograms simply find the top two or three manufacturers’ planograms online and incorporate – they will broadly all be similar but you can be fairer in terms of space allocations.