The Secret Recipe For A Successful Retail Operations System
By Praveen Kanyadi, SpotCues
Retail operations are the backbone of every store, regardless of whether it’s a small business or a large big box retailer. These systems include everything from managing inventory and staff to maintenance and customer data — any activity that keeps the shop running smoothly.
While consumer-facing advances are essential, many retailers have yet to make critical investments in back-end operations. Continuing inefficiencies on the shop floor are causing some store chains to fall behind the competition, largely due to an inferior guest experience and dated brand image.
Brick-and-mortar retailers must optimize operations to sustain themselves, ensuring the seamless functioning of all customer-facing and back-end activities. By running all systems like clockwork, both stores and customers benefit. If a store is well-stocked, clean, neatly arranged and staffed with highly trained personnel, shoppers grow to trust and prefer its brand. Add personalized offers and easy-to-use technology, and the footfalls will only increase.
However, the complexity of retail operations makes implementation a challenge. Stores must contend with numerous hurdles, including:
Paper-driven processes
The daily operations of most stores still rely heavily on paper. This manual process is cumbersome and time-consuming for store associates but, most importantly, makes tracking noncompliance in real time impossible. It also limits any historical insights and data-driven decision making.
Deskless communication
Associates on the floor have a deskless job. Communication is a vital aspect of operations and traditional channels aren’t available to these workers. Most don’t even have a corporate email address.
Training among attrition
Retail has among the highest attrition rates across industries. The constant churn makes training a huge undertaking. The struggle to provide meaningful employee engagement contributes to the issue as well.
Project management
Day-to-day operations involve several ad-hoc and repeating activities. Managers find it difficult to track and stay on top of these tasks, and there’s minimal visibility for corporate leaders into daily tasks.
Overall, the most pressing deficiencies caused by a lack of back-end technology are restricted visibility into noncompliance and inefficiencies in operations — not to mention the inability to respond in a time-sensitive manner.
The ideal retail operations ‘recipe’ can help retailers optimize their shop floor with three steps: automate operations, onboard the right tools and make data-driven decisions.
1. Automate operations on mobile
Retailers need to convert manual process such as store opening, closing and audit lists into digital checklists. This enables store associates to conveniently complete the to-dos from their phones and save significant time compared to entering this information manually.
A mobile-based task management solution makes it easy for operation leads to create ad-hoc tasks or schedule recurring activities and assign them to relevant staff. The staff members can then easily update the status of the project on the go from a mobile device. All stakeholders receive real-time notifications on progress.
In terms of training, mobile-based learning platforms can significantly reduce the onboarding time for new employees and expand skills through easy, intuitive access. These programs come with gamification features to boost participation and increase engagement. They also provide live tracking as staff members make their way through the material.
2. Onboard the right tools and micro-app technology
It’s hard to find a vendor that provides all the automation capabilities within a single platform out-of-the-box. Often, retailers end up with a very fragmented approach and a proliferation of apps that employees need to install. Training becomes more challenging, as users need to adapt to different interface styles, and initiatives start to flounder. The best platforms provide both core capabilities and the extendibility to integrate with other leading digital products.
Enterprises sometimes need a suite of apps tailored to meet the needs of a variety of functions. Essentially, these are a collection of micro-apps. As the name suggests, micro applications are lightweight apps built for a specific purpose. They contain only truly necessary features, are relatively inexpensive and are easy to learn to use.
Walmart recently announced the rollout of a suite of micro-apps for its employees to facilitate day-to-day tasks. These apps will enable store associates to look up inventory in real time or instantly find out which products have arrived in store (which, in the past, had to be entered manually).
The micro-apps are also designed to streamline store operations through insights. For example, associates can instantly see when a product went out of stock and identify the root cause, such as staffing issues or shelf capacity.
3. Make data-driven decisions
Without a robust digital architecture, retailers cannot benefit from the vast amounts of customer, employee and product data available to them. This type of information underpins the success of many tech-forward companies, like Netflix and Google, and the same idea works in a retail context.
For example, converting audit lists to digital checklists enables operation managers to track noncompliance in real time and take necessary action. Also, the availability of historical information allows for data-driven decisions and helps measure individual store performance.
Retailers must automate operations and develop real-time communication capabilities to drive operational efficiencies, stay compliant and optimize performance through data. A mobile-based store experience — both for customers and employees — enables these aspirations. As long as leadership teams select the right platforms for their stores, the investment will surely pay off in the form of increased consumer loyalty and profits.
Praveen Kanyadi is Co-Founder and VP Products at SpotCues, a micro-app platform that helps organizations rapidly mobilize their workforce. Kanyadi is an experienced product leader who has successfully led product teams, hired and mentored product managers in Fortune 500 companies and startups. In his previous role at Yahoo, he built social experiences that reached over 750 million end users. In the past five years, Kanyadi has extensively worked in developing mobile-based solutions in the B2B and B2C space and these solutions have been deployed at large enterprises across the globe.