Kotsovolos transforms operations, brings sustainability, and boosts efficiency in just six months with Azure-powered solution

Born in 1950 as a small neighborhood store in downtown Athens, today, Kotsovolos is one of the leading electrical and electronics retailers in Greece. With the purpose of empowering people to live a better life with technology, sustainability is at the core of the company’s strategy. 

Counting approximately 100 stores, Kotsovolos struggled with category and space management. The headquarters would produce planograms—i.e., tailored layouts of each store, with details on where to place the furniture or the products—and physically distribute them across the country several times a day. Accurately implementing the planograms with printed instructions was also a challenge, creating a lot of back-and-forth between the stores and the headquarters.

“Automated logistics, supply chains and AI-based optimizations are just a handful of transformations that have occurred in the retail sector, and we knew that holding a leading position required reinventing ourselves,” says Elena Ntai, Omnichannel Commercialization Manager at Kotsovolos-Dixons South East Europe. “We started looking for a category and space management platform that would automate manual and time-consuming tasks but none of the existing solutions fit the bill.”

Building a tailored solution

With Microsoft as the company’s long-time strategic partner, Kotsovolos turned to Yodiwo, a Microsoft collaborator, to build a solution from scratch. Plano360 was designed to produce planograms digitally and distribute them across stores with a click of a button, giving stores more detailed instructions and enabling the team to create follow-up tasks or questions on the platform.

“Plano360 is powered by Microsoft Azure and is fully integrated with Power BI to help us create real-time dashboards and gain visibility,” explains Irodotos Mantas, Property Development and Maintenance Manager at Kotsovolos-Dixons South East Europe. “It is the digital twin of our physical stores, optimizing space utilization, minimizing our team’s effort, and giving us stock transparency with a real-time inventory view.”

“With live inventory updates and visual merchandising guidelines, we can load up our store shelves instantly. Advanced analytics and heat maps enable our back-office teams to reveal the most and least profitable areas in stores, and increase profitability and brand awareness,” adds Mantas. “This almost personalized, worry-free solution fits our needs perfectly, and only Yodiwo had the skills, culture and talent to deliver.”

In six months, Kotsovolos onboarded all stores and brought sustainability to its processes. With digitized planograms, Kotsovolos eliminated countless daily trips to the stores in one fell swoop. “We used to print thousands of pages of merchandising instructions. Now, we’ve reduced printing by 70 percent,” says Mantas. “We have increased our space efficiency by 20 percent and our operational efficiency by 50 percent.”

The platform also brought Kotsovolos’s departments together, enabling stores to effortlessly report issues and eliminate errors. “With clearer, digitized instructions, the communication needed between the headquarters and the stores, regarding our planograms, decreased by more than 50 percent,” says Ntai. “In addition, 3,400 unknown store layout issues have been resolved.”

Usually, planogram compliance—i.e., how accurately a store implements a layout—hovers below 50 percent in retail stores that don’t digitalize space management. “Kotsovolos soon reached a compliance rate of 97 percent,” says Mantas. After freeing employees up for more customer-centric tasks and gaining more visibility, Kotsovolos stores started improving their outcomes. “Plano360 connects the physical and digital worlds, increasing our productivity, compliance and sales,” adds Mantas.