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| Thought Leadership Series | Winter/Spring 2011 | ||
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Featured Article
The Store Ops Playbook: How Retailers Can Better Serve Store Ops with Analytics and BI
Success at the store depends on extraordinary cooperation between the store operations team and key stakeholders who work elsewhere, yet store ops has typically been the retail job category most underserved with information and collaboration-friendly tools. This makes store operations one of the most difficult areas of the business. This issue of Retailing With Insight lays out how Retail Playbooks for Store Ops can directly address many of the challenges at the store level. With the evolution of new technologies and lower deployment costs providing better insight across functional areas, retailers are in a position to improve store operations in the most significant way since the move to computerized POS. With this new insight comes the promise of top- and bottom-line benefits, enhanced customer loyalty and a better workplace. 
Retailing with Insight Brown Bag Webinar: Store OpsJoin our Brown Bag Webinar on Store Ops on April 12, 1-1:30PM ET | » Register Now MULTIPLE MASTERSThe store ops team is responsible for providing a positive experience for shoppers and maintaining a purposeful, productive workplace for store associates. Store ops depends on stakeholder teams that expect extraordinary responsiveness from them despite enormous expense pressure, including: 
The routine daily work of store ops is triggered not by customers, but by central initiatives: the arrival of a truck, the start of a promotion, revising the store plan-o-gram, a loss prevention query, or a visiting manager or auditor. Retailers with more than a few dozen stores must manage a complex hierarchical store ops organization. With more stores, store brands and geographical reach, new complexities are added to the organization. Any one of the multiple managers at any level may descend on a particular store on any day to initiate some program to pump up sales, drive down expenses or both. Despite the constant stream of corporate and management-led initiatives, store ops is responsible locally for:
Headquarters wants every shopper to perceive that the store has the right merchandise, at the right time, the right place and the right price—anything less is unacceptable. INFORMATION THAT MATTERSRetailing management philosophy says, “We don’t need our store ops people to spend time looking at screens and reading reports; we need them to sell.” However, this attitude ignores the overwhelming opportunity available when store ops and headquarters are on the same page and being measured by the same set of metrics. The store ops team suffers from siloed data. They break their backs to check in every shipment, but they cannot access any shipment data. They capture every UPC code at the point of sale, but they cannot see their inventory, rate of sale or compare their performance. They develop elaborate manual reports to motivate associates and answer management, but they cannot use corporate tools. They understand how staffing levels affect their ability to convert shoppers into customers, but their corporate systems seldom correlate traffic data to actual sales. The solution is to incorporate elements from disparate data streams into one store-ops-friendly data model, including: customer data, sales and service targets, store traffic, shipments, HR, time and attendance, and, yes, sales and inventory. With this information, the store ops team can leverage data already harnessed by most of the company to better perform the functions of their jobs. Particularly valuable is the ability to correlate traffic data with key sales and expense metrics. Imagine the insights that can be gleaned when viewing the following metrics by time of day, day of week, and associates:
A PERFECT STORM OF TECHNOLOGYThis discussion about information-empowered store ops would not be possible without technology that almost every retailer has in place or is planning to deploy:
Now is the perfect time to stitch these elements together—not as a bunch of e-mail-delivered reports or an Internet store portal but as a coherent Playbook that delivers the necessary information while the store ops team is on the move so they can take the necessary action. Yes, this means mobile. The store ops team is constantly on the move and their information should be also. Fortunately, the options are plentiful and the benefits are overwhelming. Most store managers these days have grown up in the Internet Age. They spend their free time engaged with friends and family in social networks, texting, and doing multiple things at once. This technological understanding is an enduring skill: why not take advantage of this incredible phenomenon to run a better chain of stores? CAN’T WIN WITHOUT A PLAYBOOKWithout a Store Ops Playbook, the store ops team is at a disadvantage as it tackles the mounting stack of stakeholder initiatives. They scratch and pull each day to serve their multiple masters, hoping for traffic-generating weather, a merchant epiphany or some new technology to help with staffing. The QuantiSense Store Ops Playbook exploits BI to:
Let’s look at several cases with the Playbook in action. THE STORE VISITGood district managers visit their stores frequently, carrying the message, rewarding excellence, and remedying weak performance. BI’s contribution comes when it distinguishes excellence and identifies areas for improvement—all in advance of a store visit. Store visits are challenging today, but the Store Ops Playbook lays out how to run a visit. There are a range of metrics that really matter: store conversion, average sale price, units per transaction, employee productivity and performance. Why not get divisional managers, store managers and associates aligned about performance and goals in contrast to other stores? The Store Ops Playbook encourages the participants to look deeper than top-line performance against plan and last year, understanding the market basket and cross-selling dynamics. It is also insightful to examine an individual store’s best sellers and stockouts in contrast to the district, chain and similar stores. WHO’S MINDING THE STORE?The biggest challenges for store ops are the enormous expense pressure, heavy workload and finding the best personnel for the job. Most stores continuously struggle to find the right balance between experienced, highly knowledgeable associates and convenient, temporary ones; hiring and interviewing is a constant flow of activity. Store managers must manage complex schedules to keep the store staffed appropriately, considering the store traffic and demand. Store operations analytics can help in this regard by tracking staffing levels at busy times and slow times against such key metrics as conversion rate, average sale and count of customers per hour. The key is to find the optimum staffing level relative to sales per labor hour. Conversely, the right exception reporting can also pinpoint the times of the week and day when the traffic is the lowest, so a merchant can schedule a promotional activity or necessary store upkeep during those times. MOTIVATING ASSOCIATESEveryone loves a contest. Contests are focusing, fun and fulfilling, but creating and managing a good contest can be a major challenge for store ops managers. BI can help. Too many sales reporting systems are restricted in how they can report sales. For example, if your contest is for all sales in the early evening hours between Monday and Wednesday, you might be forced to record the sales yourself. Often you want to motivate a certain kind of sale (e.g., gift cards, over a certain level, only with full price merchandise); this is even more demanding without BI's powerful filtering abilities. Moreover, employees want to know that the contest is administered fairly and how they are doing during the contest. This lets them know what reward might come with extra effort. SummaryWith the advent of BI, networks and mobile computing, there are no longer systemic reasons for store ops managers to be isolated and underserved from powerful computer-based analytical solutions. Sales should be reported consistently all the way up the chain, revealing performance against targets, and store labor schedules should be analyzed against actual customer traffic. Information-based store visits can result in much more constructive exchanges leading to remedial actions, reward, and inter-departmental collaboration; contests that tap the power of BI can motivate desired behavior. For retailers who have long been focused on delivering a better customer experience, QuantiSense's Retail Playbooks for Store Ops can provide the critical missing link: helping improve operations at the storefronts their customers enter every day. About the Author: Questions? |
CEO Corner
The retail industry has come astoundingly far in the past 20 years of technological innovation. Headquarters has rich performance information (especially if they are using QuantiSense) down to any store and any level in the company. And where is the store manager in all this? Back in the stone age. Or, at least the pre-Web 2.0 age, relying on scattered emails/phone calls and static, siloed spreadsheets to try to gain insight about their business. At QuantiSense, our vision is to empower the store manager – the too-often forgotten hero of retailing. We have found that store managers love information about their stores but don’t have the time or tools to consume it – so the trick is to deliver the data in a way that’s specially tailored to their role. That’s why we’ve made our dashboards more accessible than ever on mobile platforms like the iPad, and recently launched our store manager-friendly QuantiSense Store Ops product. I hope you enjoy this article from Bill Robinson on empowering Store Ops with analytics. Cheers, 
Jeff Buck QuantiSense News
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QuantiSense is the leading provider of business intelligence and data warehousing applications exclusively for specialty retailers. The company was formed in 2001 by a team of experienced data warehousing professionals who recognized the need for a retail-specific data warehousing and BI solution that was low risk, cost effective and could be quickly implemented. |
Retail requires outstanding execution at the point of customer contact. Over the past years, retail executives have been largely focused on creating an outstanding shopping experience for their online customers. But, the majority of customer experience continues to be at the brick-and-mortar store, where there is great opportunity to improve store level operations and, in doing so, the customer experience.
We’ve all heard it: It’s 2011 – where’s my jetpack already?
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