Store operations excellence
With economic turbulence around the world, stemming from the credit crunch in the United States to inflation concerns in Europe and Asia, retailers are feeling the pressure. Some retailers, however, are responding to these concerns with actions – moving on their global expansion strategies, improving their operational processes and capabilities, and revamping their existing stores to improve ROI.
A.T. Kearney’s global Store Operations team includes experts who are helping retailers drive significant top-and-bottom value. Team members have broad experience in all aspects of improving and operationalizing retail strategies.
STORE OPERATIONS EXCELLENCE FRAMEWORK
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Drive store value
Whether developing expansion strategies or redefining and honing existing business strategies, retailers require insightful, data-based direction setting. Retailers want to better understand, for example: Who is my core customer and what is our value proposition to them? How can we best leverage our customer “feedback loop” to drive corporate decision-making? How can we improve our service model and store environment to better align with our customers’ needs? How many stores can the market support, in what formats, and locations?
A.T. Kearney works with retailers to translate insights from customer needs and preferences into actionable strategies that maximize the value of real estate and store investments. We combine customer analytics with demographic market data and real estate information to enhance real estate market planning, site selection, and store format development.
Our experts in Store Operations provide insightful solutions to clients in all stages of growth. Here are some of the ways we help retailers drive store value:
- Voice of the customer — actionable customer insights
- Banner strategy — brand positioning, effective operating model, aligned product and merchandising
- Store business-planning — growth and market assessment & planning, site and store format, real estate selection and negotiations, financial planning
Deliver core store operations
A.T. Kearney works with retailers to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their “inside the 4-walls” retail operations. We help retailers solve many issues related to their core store operations, such as: Are store teams receiving, storing, merchandising, replenishing, and maintaining the inventory shipped to stores? How does product forecasting & replenishment enhance store operations? Are the right associates staffed at the right times of day to productively provide a great customer experience and cover key activities? Have we eliminated waste from in-store processes, while maximizing margin enhancing opportunities? Am I getting the best performance from the store management team and the field management team?
We combine our deep retail experience with our data-driven approach to identify real opportunities to reduce operating costs, enhance customer experience, and grow revenue. Our capabilities can be applied to retailers operating a wide variety of retail formats.
Our deep supply chain experience enables us to link inside-the-store operations with supply chain capabilities to ensure the efficient flow of goods. And organizational effectiveness expands beyond the store to include field management. Specifically, we help retailers enhance core store operations through:
- Supply chain interfaces — replenishment and logistics protocols
- Store operations — 4-wall efficiency and effectiveness, space management, training, performance management
- Store and field leadership — roles, spans-of-control, competencies
Enable store value
We help retailers make smart choices about capital and operating expenses – significantly lowering their store life-cycle costs and ultimately optimizing their total cost of ownership.
To lower store life-cycle costs, we develop the data-driven metrics and organization-wide views that guide retailers towards insights for critical issues, such as: Does your store design do justice to your margins? How can you best drive down per-footage build-out costs, and who in your organization is responsible for savings? Is your organization motivated to improve costs, quality, and cycle-time for construction and service vendors? Do you need better visibility into non-merchandise procurement? Are you leveraging the right technology to enable your business strategy, including merchandise, non-merchandize, and staffing decisions?
A.T. Kearney and the Store Operations team bring considerable experience with retailers around the world, plus deep expertise in supply management and supplier relations to minimize costs and optimizing infrastructure for savings in total cost of ownership. We help retailers enable their store value through:
- Store lifecycle management — store portfolio management, construction, facilities management
- Operating expense control — procurement and management of store indirect expenditures
- Store technology — labor scheduling, replenishment, IT interfaces (ERP, POS, CRM), performance management reporting
Learning Store Methodology
A.T. Kearney's unique Learning Store Methodology provides a controlled and action-oriented environment where all performance opportunities are driven and owned by each store's team. Learning Stores are a few representative stores where changes are made and measured for their impact and benefit - before changes are rolled out to other stores. These stores model changes and develop lessons learned, and then pass on the knowledge across the store network.
The Learning Store Methodology provides many benefits of change:
- Establishes a baseline and monitoring process
- Involves all levels of store personnel for increased buy-in
- Isolates existing store processes for further analysis and improvement
- Enables the overall Steering Group to prioritize and order changes for roll-out
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