Why Self-Auditing - not 3rd Party Auditing - is the future of Field Team Efficiency in Grocery Stores

Through auditing in grocery stores, managers can find what is needed to improve sales rates but this comes with a unique set of challenges. Depending on your approach, audits can help evaluate your store’s performance in a variety of ways. Take the retail operations audit, for example. It is used to ensure your operations meet company standards, or the merchandising audit, which ensures that products are displayed correctly and sell better or consider field team auditing. When done correctly, it helps decrease your field team’s response times, saving time and allowing you to direct your field teams to more important tasks. Other types of audits include customer service or loss prevention but the list goes on. Every audit, if done correctly and efficiently will boost your sales while increasing your store’s operational standards. But as said before, auditing itself is a challenge and if done improperly will become more of an operational hindrance than a solution. For instance, failing to document the audit properly or doing a meticulous audit and not following up on the prescribed actions drive costs without material benefit. 

Research shows that auditing - when done right -, provides great benefits. According to this article digital auditing can boost sales up-to %157. Forbes Insights/KPMG report Audit 2025 also mentions that four in five respondents—80%—say auditors should use bigger samples and more sophisticated technologies for gathering data and performing analysis in their daily work. This case study also mentions that Reckitt Benckiser increased its portion of the perfect stores by 157% while also significantly decreasing the reporting time. This decrease enabled him to direct teams to valuable tasks.

How Do Third-Party Audit and Self-Auditing Work?

3rd party auditing is done by an independent company with no conflicting interests while self-auditing is done by associates or the store manager. Both ways, generally, evaluate the same aspects of the store. Including field team efficiency in retail or health and safety but this is done using different tools and criteria. Often, both start at the request of the store manager. Though both have their respective advantages and disadvantages, self-auditing seems to be more preferred by forward-thinking retailers using enabling tech – like computer vision and mobile apps. Thanks to the rise of the digital world, what was once done by a team of workers, can now be done with a single person and with notably more efficiency. The resulting audit is no different. The new digital self-audit process done with Vispera solutions is more than promising. 

Manual Data Collection (3rd Party Auditing) Is Antiquated

Technology has already started making the traditional way of doing things with an army of workers redundant. This is precisely why 3rd party auditing is out. To elaborate, third-party auditing costs much more than self-auditing as you are hiring “professional consultants” to do the auditing These professionals are paid too much to spend time doing manual audits and are better suited to advise you on better ways of running your business. Often, as the 3rd party doesn’t know your operations as well as you do, their reports may be inaccurate, late, or may not yield the results you’d hoped for. This, then, can become a total waste of time causing you to either do the auditing again yourself or hire another professional to do work for you, once again, not knowing if you will get the results you hope. At this stage, auditing becomes an obstacle rather than a solution. But with digital and self-auditing you can do all the auditing yourself with a fraction of the cost of hiring a third party.

Self-Auditing Is In

As we answered the question “what is a self-audit”, let’s take a look at the advantages of self-auditing, especially with the rise of the digital world. Self-auditing before the technology already had the cost and more accurate audit advantages. But with technologies like real-time shelf monitoring and management system, which is an image recognition technology powered by machine learning, your staff will no longer have to dedicate most of their time to shelf management in retail, instead, they can now focus on improving the customer experience. With everything now digitalized and more understandable, you can instantly detect any performance drop in your field teams, find the problem through comparison to other data related to staff auditing in a supermarket or any retail store and make decisions to increase team motivation and solve the problem. 

Labor costs in retail will drop tremendously as every corner of the store can now be checked in detail, directly through image recognition systems without having to hire an extra employee, and field teams will be able to check other stores. One digital control panel is all you need to cover all the data all your stores have so, staff auditing in retail through comparison between field teams will be easier than ever. As the data is collected by machines, the accuracy level of the collected data will be almost at its highest level possible. And most importantly, all the data is stored digitally so, you will be boosting your sales while also saving the environment. 

Best Practices for Conducting Audits in Grocery

Periodical audits are crucial to the success and local market share of grocery stores. Regardless of the source of audit chosen, self-auditing or third-party auditing, it has become essential to embrace fast, efficient, and sustainable digital solutions in today's rapidly evolving world. We have compiled some of the points you need to consider regarding increasing operational efficiency with Vispera's cutting-edge, digital solutions. Take your place at the top of the market by:

●   Minimizing cost/spending

●   Accelerating the process

●   Transparency in all processes

●   More meaningful and useful data

●   Maximizing customer experience

●   Increasing team performance

●   Digitalization of retail execution

●   Reducing labor costs + Gaining from time = Win at every store!

In summary, digital auditing solutions introduce a new and time-efficient way to manage stores. Cut unnecessary costs caused by antiquated, auditing practices and earn more in every store by doing less. Request a pilot now to become a part of the next generation!