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Already running a supermarket store and wondering how to scale it further? Are you contemplating what should be your next steps to accomplish your vision to organize and manage multiple stores?

If this is what you are looking for, then you are in the right place. Your Retail Coach’s consultancy service will help you achieve this vision. Your Retail Coach’s supermarket consultants will help you with the right business plans and assist you in this growth path.

Important steps to organize & grow clothing store

  1. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

Any successful business has a very strong set of standard operating procedures. This is the only step that allows you to scale up your business in the future. In simple terms consider SOPs as flowcharts and tasks for various scenarios that can arise in a business. It is like defining to-do steps for various supermarket business processes. Some of the key reasons why SOPs for the supermarket are important are:

  • Allow all departments to work in tandem seamlessly as they would have interdependencies at some of the other stages.
  • Gives clarity to the new manpower of how things are to be done.
  • Minimizes operational challenges.
  • They ensure efficiency and throughputs of every individual to be maximized.
  • Minimises error and gives a definite path.
  • Provides backbone for scalability to multiple stores with minimum challenges
  1. Warehouse Layout Planning

Warehouse layout plays a vital role in effective supermarket inventory management. It is said the warehouse is the heart of a supermarket business. It can address many soft teething issues like maintaining a desired minimum stock level and avoid stock-outs thus preventing opportunity losses. Replenishment becomes much easier at various store points. The design and layout are crucial so that the goods flow (goods entry & exit) is smooth and is like a supply chain. It is crucial to ensure that similar SKUs are stored together and in such a way that aids easy access to the personnel. There should be adequate space kept at the warehouse for activities like barcoding and labeling. Having a strategically designed warehouse becomes the backbone for multi-chain expansion

  1. IT System Integration

For supermarket growth; Data and its synchronicity across all your stores are imperative in this day and age. It allows the data attributes to be the “same” across all stores, which can allow an excellent analysis of sales trends across regions. That could allow you to set up margin discussion/discounts/analyze the aging of products most effectively. Thus, expansion or stability without a robust software or retail ERP is impossible. If you already have an ERP/ POS application, then it must have the capability to support your expansion. Our experts will evaluate your existing ERP or evaluate/suggest the appropriate ERP which is the best fit as per your existing Human Resource capability and future expansion vision. The overall objective is to make the expansion journey easy and sustainable.

  1. Staff Training: SOPs & Sales

In scaling up a supermarket store channel business to a multi-chain model – Middle-Level Management plays a vital role to achieve sustainability. Human resource management in supermarkets is a vital cog of the wheel. They are the ones who are going to be your relay points in executing top-level strategies and provide you insight into the store performance. They are going to be like your surrogates for the various departments they handle as you cannot be present everywhere at every point and time. Thus, inculcating the habit of defining SOPs and training the team on them by the team will lead to much better results. Train them on the SOPs defined in such a way that the store operates like a well-oiled machine even without your presence and allows you time to focus on the bigger picture of identifying and figuring how to scale up further

Here are some common challenges encountered while organizing & scaling a supermarket store:

  1. Team Planning

Most often in the growth expansion of supermarkets, the Organisation structure is overlooked in detailing. Defining a proper Organisation structure, identifying their roles correctly allows you to depute the correct manpower to the correct role and in the correct personnel, count required.

  1. Low owner-involvement in-store management

A store launched without proper standard operating procedures, systems, and processes in place will lead to the owner dependent model on daily operations. This will not allow the store to function without the owners’ presence. Also when you expand it’s practically impossible for the owner to be present at every location and every instance to a dose of any issue. To avoid this, structures and procedures have to be pre-planned and pre-built into the system, so that they are implemented and operational right from day 1.

  1. Roles & Responsibilities of the team

Apart from following the “processes” set for standard situations in any retail store, the team’s additional responsibilities are also to create and maintain in-store displays (Visual merchandising), develop and execute sales and promotions strategies finalized, analyze and understand market trends and provide feedback about the same, gauge opportunities and competition, and keep track of sales figures, forecast sales volumes, and meet existing sales targets. A united, professional, and friendly team will create a welcoming atmosphere for all visitors, making them feel totally at ease, and give them the impression that the store is welcoming. Summing this up, as stated earlier, defining the exact job description (the daily tasks and the softer intangible aspects) is crucial to get a store function properly.

  1. Inventory Management

The old age adage of right place, right time, right quantity, and right quality still stands true. Keeping an eye on the SKUS/Categories of the supermarket business is detrimental. With a keen eye on inventory, one can avoid

  • Deadstock/Overstocking
  • Take corrective action on near to expiry products
  • Opportunity loss by maintaining an adequate amount of stock

Managing inventory in a supermarket business is the key to getting repeat and loyal customers.

  1. Employee Management

If the warehouse is the heart of a supermarket business, the employees are the heartbeat. To ensure uniformity and consistency concerning employment policies, a standardized SOP or employee handbook has to be created and enforced right from the start of the store that is from day 01. This shall also help increase employee satisfaction and bring transparency within the working culture.

  1. Staff Documentation

As the organization grows large, the statutory laws and regulations start to come into picture. Not only that, having proper employee documentation also hygiene in the system. Thus as a part of the recruitment process, proper systems/checks and documentation processes must be in place. Documents specifying all basic details should be collected from all the new joiners as part of the joining formalities before they initiate the job. This ensures trust and confidence between both parties.

  1. Customer Happiness Ratio

With the advent of e-commerce and technology, retail store success in today’s world is all about creating a unique customer experience. Right from the time customers sets foot in the store, the overall shop design and layout, ambiance, buying and checking out experience has to be centered around the consumer with your walk-ins, otherwise, you will lose your customer to your competitors nearby. A strong sales and service training system along with feedback management is also a must-have to reduce the probability of non-buying or dissatisfied customers.

  1. Loss Prevention

Pilferage is common in the supermarket business. Customer theft (external pilferage) and employee theft (internal theft) may hit your bottom line, if not taken care of. Though both internal and external pilferage affects the bottom line and inventory mismatch in the system, internal pilferage is a plague that causes unnoticed losses over years. Most retailers fail to follow a loss prevention protocol, which results in heavy losses and becomes a slow poison for the business. Loss Prevention needs to be tracked and mitigated on a regular basis with appropriate systems from day 01.

  1. Implementing the right store management software

For startup entrepreneurs, it can become difficult to identify the best store management software. After seeing demos, all applications and features look the same and entrepreneurs ultimately end up opting for a low-priced, inferior software. In the coaching program, you will receive a detailed checklist to select software that is the best fit for your business and vision. Top Level Management must guard against a few reports/ dashboards, which act as early warning signals to avoid long-term losses. Thus, selecting the right software is a must not only for effective monitoring and system management but also for making business decisions to help prevent losses and achieve sustainable growth.

  1. Warding off Competition

Implementing the right store management software Right from your pre-planning activities to after opening your store, you should always study existing competitors and strategize how to position yourself and break into the market. Through effective pricing strategies, promotional strategies, and social media marketing, you can directly reach out to potential customers and offer them benefits. It’s not always required to be different, but it’s important to be consistent in offering good service and value-for-money products to your customers to enjoy customer loyalty and gain a competitive edge.

Why YRC as Growth Advisor?

Implementing the right store management software YRC’s extensive services offered are designed to enlighten you with best practices and innovative strategies to help you overcome these challenges and build a successful and sustainable retail business.

 

PROCESS AUTOMATION

The idea of having Ecommerce Consultants on-board from the beginning itself points towards reducing the involvement of the promoters in daily operations. Ecommerce Businesses willing to be a brand reaping profits & sustaining the competition must ensure that most of their processes should be automated. The more the manual intervention, the more would be the errors.

In Ecommerce business, you get only 1 chance to impress the customer & if you mess up there, you lose the customer for long.

Process automation in respect to all the activities pertaining to customers from order receiving to order fulfilment is a must for a seamless experience for the customers.

Task Management is another grey area where most deadlines fail as 90% of the tasks are assigned manually & are forgotten, unheard, misunderstood or mistaken.

YRC Team of Ecommerce Management Consultants helps to make maximum of the processes system-driven to ensure minimalistic manual intervention.

VIDEOGRAPHY & PHOTOGRAPHY

No matter how good your product is, the customer would know only if it looks good.

Photography includes the following steps:

  • Cataloguing your products
  • Cataloguing your images
  • Backup your images (A few cloud storage solutions include Dropbox, Google Drive, Bitcasa, Apple’s Cloud Storage etc.)
  • Choose the right camera & lens (You may also outsource the photography to a third party agency)

DIGITAL MARKETING

Digital Marketing includes SEO & SMM. SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimization includes activities like back-linking, meta tags, blog-writing etc. to ensure your website ranks on the 1st page on Google Search.

Next comes SMM i.e. “Social Media Marketing” which as the name suggests including promoting your products on all the social media sites, email marketing, influencer marketing & several other BTL activities.

These activities are going to be recurring & would decide the traffic on the website, the conversions, whether the right target market is tapped, the likes, the views, the orders, the reviews & much more. YRCs Ecommerce Consultants create a budget for digital marketing right from pre-launch to launch & for each month thereafter.

Building digital marketing strategies in coordination with the agency, selecting them to signing them off would be the role of YRC.

This ensures seamless coordination, detailed interactions & desired execution as it is always advisable to work with a single agency than multiple of them.

IT INTEGRATION

Selection of the right software for smooth functioning of back-end operations right from production to webstore display would be suggested and integrated by YRC Team.

YRC’s Team defines SOPs of Product Movement, maps it with the locations & people. They then create a blueprint of all the features required in the software & help in shortlisting & selection.

IT Integration involves connecting your offline inventories with real-time online webstore so when a sale occurs, inventories get deducted real time across offline as well as online platforms.

This helps in accurate inventory management, maintaining the MOQs, re-order levels & achieving the optimum inventory levels.

Some popular software include unicommerce, viniculum for your front-end website management & Genisys for your entire back-end Purchase, Production, Accounting, Invoicing etc. management.

WAREHOUSE & LOGISTICS PLANNING

  • How many cities or countries you wish to sell in?
  • Where should your Warehouse be located?
  • Should you have one warehouse in each country or city?
  • Should you be having your own delivery team in your base city?
  • Would the 3rd party vendors be reliable? What happens when they lose or misplace your product during delivery?
  • How should I manage the logistics if my goods are coming from different countries?
  • How should the goods be stored and barcoded?
  • How much space do I require for warehouse?
  • I am sure several such questions must be haunting you while you think of starting your own fashion ecommerce brand.

 

At YRC, our warehousing and logistics experts can help you devise a strategy for all of the above mentioned queries and much more.

We design the layout of the Warehouse considering the inward, goods processing, software entry, barcoding, outward, goods return, scrap storage, goods stacking & much more.

Logistics route plan is devised considering the manufacturer to your warehouse and from there to last mile delivery locations.

UI & UX DESIGNING

This Step involves 03 distinct parts:

Part 1: Choosing the right Platform:

From several platforms available in the market right from Shopify to magento, woocommerce, prestoshop, wordpress etc. you must choose the one that fits best for your business

Part 2: UX Designing:

“UX” denotes User Experience, which if put in simple language is building the functional requirements of the website.

UX Designing includes designing the features required in the website, customer journey map, website features, the browsing features, navigation features, ecommerce order management process flow, checkout cart features, catalogue management, ecommerce payment system, cross selling features & much more.

“As per statistics, 68% of the customers abandon the carts before payment”

An interesting UX ensures the customer sticks on to the website for a longer time.

Part 3: UI Designing:

UI stands for User Interface, which means designing the look and feel of the website. UI includes using the right colours, elements and the entire aesthetics of the website.

A good User Interface ensures the user completes the task that he has come for. It navigates the user through the journey of the brand in the simplest but most effective way.

The UX designer maps out the bare bones of the user journey; the UI designer then fills it in with visual and interactive elements.

If User experience is the bare bone, user interface wraps it up with an attractive cape.

At YRC, our team if experts can help you develop the entire User Journey to ensure it is engaging!

SAMPLING & PRODUCTION

This step follows the “Designing” Phase, whether you have an in-house design team, freelance designers or an outsourced design company. It is one of the most exciting phases, as here you see your designs turning into products & your ideas turning into reality.

In most start-up cases, production is outsourced i.e. brands tie-up with the established manufacturers/ job-workers to get their products manufactured.

Sampling involves multiple 04 Stages, Fit-Sample, Prototype Sample, Pre-Production Sample & the Production Sample.

Prototype Sample is the first sample provided to the buyer. It can be in any fabric/ colour. This sample is just to understand whether the product design looks equally great in reality.

Fit Sample, as the name suggests is prepared to check the fit of the garment i.e. the various sizes, length, width etc.

Pre-production is made by the actual production line. Here the stitching quality and other aspects related to manufacturing are checked. This is the last stage where rejection can be accepted.

Production Sample is made before the production which is the replica of what is going to be finally produced.

Once you are through with all this, you are good to go ahead & get your goods manufactured.

PRODUCT DESIGNING / SOURCING

Product Designing or Sourcing is the heart of the Ecommerce Fashion Brand.

Product Designing / Sourcing can be done in several ways, as follows:

  • In-house Design Team
  • Freelance Designers
  • Outsourced Design Team
  • Ready Product Sourcing (From Manufacturer or Wholesaler)

At YRC, we evaluate your business strategy & business model to arrive at the decision, which of the above ways would be best-fit for your business. In certain cases, product sourcing may be a combination of the above.

These are the people who are going to build your brand! Whether they are the designers or merchandiser, your brand look is going to be in their hands.

If you are designing each garment from the scratch, the sourcing would play crucial role in developing design identity of your brand.

Sourcing includes fabric, trims, lining & all the raw material required to build the garment.

BRANDING

Branding is the “Look of the Brand”, right from logo to tagline, the colours used, the brand story, the brand communications on social media, the packaging & all the other aspects which speak directly or indirectly to the customers. Branding constitutes the look & feel of the brand & hence must be thoughtfully planned to match with the product that we are selling.

Branding must appeal to our target audience. Example : A golden colour logo depicting finesse, art, richness, premium, however beautiful it may be individually cannot go with a brand selling affordable kids wear products. So, your logo must be in-line with your brand positioning, whether you are an expensive brand or a luxury brand or a value for money brand, it must be depicted from your “Branding”.

It is an integral part to attract the target audience.

ORGANOGRAMS & SOP’s

Organogram is the “HR Blueprint” of the business which is created at the onset, to map out the team required across each function at various stages of the business. At the launch, only key people need to be got on board to ensure the project gets started & at this stage, all of them need to multi-task. Similarly, certain financial as well as operational goals are set for addition of the further team. Example, for the operations team, we hire 1 operations manager during the pre-launch phase & we add 1 more only when the business kicks-off & we reach a volume of selling more than 1000 pcs/ month or a turnover of more than 0.1 million USD.

SOPs are Standard Operating Procedures, a bible to run the entire organization right from Sales, Purchase, HR, Order receiving to Order fulfilment, Inventory Management, Accounts, Warehouse, Logistics, Supply Chain, Production & all the other relevant functions for the business. Business must be organized from its first day of operations; only then the tasks can be delegated.

At YRC, we design the organization structure, the processes, and approximate time taken to execute each process, job profile of every member within the organization, their KRAs, KPIs & the Reporting Structure.

CRITICAL PATHWAY

Critical Pathway Analysis (CPA), is a project management technique which cannot be overlooked while launching an ecommerce fashion brand. Brand launch process is cumbersome with multiple inter-dependent & time-bound tasks involved, which need to be tracked to ensure the project remains on track.

CPA outlines key tasks across the project, their turnaround time (TAT) & the dependencies of tasks upon each other. It identifies the sequence of tasks, their interdependent steps from inception to completion, their criticalities, and their dates of onset, target dates of completion along with the key responsible person for the respective activities. Critical Pathway helps in understanding the unimportant & not urgent tasks which may jeopardize the execution of the project because of an unexpected snag! It also maps out the potential bottlenecks which might be posed because of the dependencies of tasks upon each other & cases where the next task cannot be commenced before the completion of the previous one.

CPA detects the minimum & the maximum time involvement of a particular individual or team to execute the task, thereby arriving at the overall deadlines associated with the project.

At Your Retail Coach, we design the Critical Pathway & review it periodically to ensure the project is on track & the progress is measurable.

BUSINESS STRATEGY & BUSINESS PLAN

Business Strategy includes the vision, mission, goals, business model, business plan & strategy for all the functions within the organization.

Business Strategy is a well-defined plan that outlines who, what, where, why, how & when for the company; for example, who would be the target market, how to attract the target audience, when to launch new products, where to operate from, how to handle competitors, what would be the USP, what would be long term goal of the organization & several other answers to the 5Ws of Strategy.

Business Strategy aligns the organization towards a common goal. Business SWOT helps company to identify & overcome their weaknesses & focus to sharpen the strengths. Business strategy forecasts future risks and helps business in building skillsets to overcome the potential threats.

YRC’s Business Plan focuses on creating a “Blueprint” of the business, thereby deriving the feasibility of the concept & gauge whether the opportunity is lucrative to invest time, energy & effort. Business Plan creates cash flow understanding i.e. building inflow & outflow cash projections from Week zero to week 60 i.e. 05 year projection. Business Plan calculates the capital investment, operating costs, one-time costs, recurring costs & all the other numbers relevant to obtain the breakeven sales, return on investment, return on capital, internal rate of return & several other ratios. Business Plan is also one of the important requirements if you are targeting the “Investor Route”. Fund raising becomes extremely transparent & channelized. With business plan panned out clearly, the business will know until what point must it be stretched & where to stop, which reduces the probability of unplanned investments.

MARKET RESEARCH

Starting the concept of Ecommerce Fashion brand with Market Research ensures we get detailed understanding of the industry & this research report also acts as a social confirmation for your concept. Market Research helps in understanding the target locations, their population, potential online buyers for your product, competitors for each category, and top selling products of the competitors, competitors’ price range, offers & their responses & much more. Market Research helps in thorough understanding of your brand position as compared to our competitors. It helps in identifying gaps in the market, in your category along with the scope of the said product in the desired market. This will help in validation of your concept & prevents you from making the same mistakes as your fellow brands, eventually saving your time, energy & efforts. This phase is also a make or a break phase, as the market research study may at-times come up with some eye-popping numbers & statistics which might compel you to re-think on your product or category that you are planning to sell or alter your entire concept itself!! Market Research Reports analyse the competitors’ webstore for their traffic, conversion & sales. This is extremely valuable information to derive our inventory budgets & projections, which takes us to our next phase.