At Cantactix, one of our core values is sharing information inside and outside of our company. With over 800 years of combined industry experience on our team, it can be hard to share something that no one has seen before – but that is exactly what one of our planogram specialists, Pat Sengsouriya, did at a recent team meeting.
Pat was looking to optimize her workflow and maximize her efficiency. Though we often talk about tools like MissionControl, to help automate some of your merchandising tasks, you ultimately always reach a point where you have to do some manual work. Pat showed us how she can merchandise an entire planogram – without ever touching her keyboard.
How? By using a gaming mouse.
What is a Gaming Mouse?
A gaming mouse is similar to a regular computer mouse, but has the addition of several buttons that can be configured to perform certain actions. Normally, a gaming mouse is used for complex computer games, where you might want to quickly swap out and reload weapons, switch between camera angles, open treasure maps, manage villagers, organize troops, and chat with other gamers. With so many different commands, having access more buttons can be a real time-saver.
There are many gaming mice available on the market, but this is the one that Pat used for her demonstration.
How is this going to help?
Just like managing a prehistoric empire or organizing an army of orcs, merchandising a planogram and hitting the necessary metrics involves many small steps. From increasing/decreasing facings, opening a table, showing a highlight, examining labels – each step can take several clicks of the mouse, and memorizing all the possible shortcuts is challenging, to say the least.
A gaming mouse provides an interesting solution to this problem. The mouse comes with software that allows you to configure keyboards shortcuts to each button on the mouse. No more memorizing keyboard shortcuts or even having to take your hands off the mouse – you can do it all with the click of a button. This will take your mouse from being merely a point-and-click device to a powerful tool – allowing you to control your most common planogramming tasks without ever having to touch your keyboard.
Using the easy-to-use interface that comes with your mouse, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to each button on the mouse setting it up to use exactly the steps you use the most. Once you have set up your mouse to your liking, the settings can be saved as a file so you can share with your team. If you ever change computers, you can simply reload your settings.
For this mouse, the buttons can easily be configured by clicking on the little arrows and selecting ‘Edit’ from the menu displayed. If you don’t know the shortcut for the task you want to perform, Space Planning’s help file has a detailed list of all the available shortcut keys. Then, it’s simply a matter of assigning that shortcut to the button:
Within minutes, you can have your entire mouse configured to perform exactly the tasks you need as efficiently as possible. And as an added benefit, you’ll finally be able to finish that quest in World of Warcraft!
Ready to learn more about Cantactix? Connect with us today.