Are You Managing Your Retail Operations Efficiently?
If you aren’t managing the ins and outs of your retail operations, you will likely see money seep through the floor. Profitability is directly tied to operational efficiency. This is accomplished by managing customer relationships better, selling the right products to the right people at the right price, and managing expenses and logistical processes so that merchandise arrives on time and in the right numbers.
Bottom line, if your customers aren’t happy and your product inventory levels are not right, then you won’t sell merchandise and you will lose money. Operational management is key to your success.
8 Key Components to Operational Efficiency in Retail
To become more efficient in your retail chain operations, you’ll need to manage these 8 core components of your retail operations:
- Employee Productivity – With the right reports, you can determine if your sales people and your merchandising employees are being productive in all the right ways.
- Store Performance – What are your key performance indicators? When you define those, you can then measure each store’s performance against them. Not only can you see the current status of each store in your chain, but you can also track historical considerations, make comparisons that are apples to apples comparisons, and track each store’s performance over time.
- Sales – Sales analysis involves more than just what product is moving through your chain today. You want to know what sizes, colors, and other parameters are selling the most, what products have sold the most historically, and make comparisons over time in even stores that have closed. A true comparative sales analysis includes a multi-tiered approach tied to product and store performance.
- Discounts & Promotions – How you monitor store discounts, product discounts, and promotions says a lot about how you measure store performance. It is important to consider exceptions and configure your settings properly.
- Budgeting – Don’t concern yourself just with chain budgets, but also individual store budgets.
- Marketing – True operational efficiency ties your marketing actions to your customer relationships.
- Loss Prevention – Product gets lost or merchandise damaged. It’s a part of business. However, you can mitigate your losses and get true reporting based on discrepancies and real data.
- Inventory – One of the most important aspects of your retail operations efficiency is inventory control. Do you have accurate product counts? How are you monitoring activity with merchandise movement? How often do you take physical inventory. It all points to your operational efficiency and profitability.
Don’t just manage your business. Manage your retail operations more efficiently with the right tools.