Retail Expansion Consulting

How the element of people is managed by retail enterprises plays a decisive role in their growth and expansion endeavours.

To begin with, employees significantly shape the quality of customer experience and customer loyalty built over time. As the vanguard representatives in the forms of salespersons, cashiers, and customer support executives, how employees conduct themselves with customers leaves a strong impact on their brand experience. This covers technical knowledge, understanding of consumer behaviour and human psychology, communication skills, attitude, and presentation. Without the required skills and competencies, even sustaining a business can get difficult let alone striving for growth and expansion.

Secondly, employee engagement and employees’ performance and productivity levels also draw implications from the quality of people management. For improved engagement and productivity levels, it is important to keep the morale and motivation of employees high. This comes from how organisations value their employees and keep them in the loop of business endeavours. If not, they will just perform like machines with little to no enthusiasm and commitment. Growth and expansion cannot be achieved with a workforce that does not feel valued, engaged, or motivated enough.

On the third front is the quality of leadership and efforts for brewing in-house talent. Good leaders help make good teams. From top to bottom, desirable levels of leadership are crucial to effectively manage a workforce at the enterprise-wide level. Leadership directly affects how people are treated in an organisation. This treatment includes communication, supervision and support, encouragement, and overall development of employees. Most organisations make the mistake of overpowering their managers and supervisors with such levels of authority governing job safety, pay hikes, and promotions that it is easier for employees to prioritise toeing the line of their seniors rather than doing what is best for the company or what their job demands. Thinking of growth and expansion in such an organisational set-up is counterproductive to the idea of growth and expansion.

Processes define how things should be done. This essence holds significant ramifications on the quality of operations carried out by organisations, maintaining the intended standards of services, and operational preparedness levels for scale and expansion.

Well-defined processes help secure consistency in operations across all locations and channels leading to predictability of efforts and outcomes. This confidence is necessary when operations have to be replicated somewhere else in the event of scale and expansion.

Defining processes inherently demands the simplification of workflows leading to streamlined operations and enhanced operational efficiency. Getting here is important because simplification is a desirable attribute and simplified operations are always a better option for replication.

Scale and expansion come at a cost. Already having streamlined and optimised business processes go easy on budgets with minimised errors and best-known ways of resource utilisation.

In the event of establishing new stores in new locations, things like customer service, brand loyalty, and service quality must not take a beating. While at the strategic level, things may look similar; it is at the level of execution or operations where customers might encounter a different experience. Having established processes ensures that the due standards are maintained in the level of operations whether it is an external process involving customers or an internal process affecting employees and suppliers.

From operations to customer experience, there is hardly any area of the retail business where technology has not left its imprint. It has become nearly inconceivable to think of growth and expansion in retail without taking technology along. It is because technology has empowered us with capabilities to make more accurate, complex, and timely business decisions on scale with far more convenience than what we could have achieved with our business acumen and human efforts alone.

If inventory management is considered, modern-day technologies like RFID and IOT allow us to track inventory in real time. The fallout of this is that today it is easier for retailers to optimise stock levels and reduce situations of under and over-stocking. Such tactical assistance becomes even more vital with expanded inventory and a wider channel and distribution network.

In warehouses and FCs, automation solutions are adding speed and accuracy to operations like picking, packing, and sorting. Operational efficiency and cost optimisations are critical when considering situations of handling higher business volumes.

AI-powered analytics solutions are drastically changing how demand forecasting is done using historical business data, market trend analysis, real-time supply chain activities and developments, and AI’s predictive abilities.

Technology has also impacted how personalisation strategies are formulated and executed. The ability of retail brands and businesses to effectively personalise offers and recommendations for their customers across markets plays a big role in acquisition, conversion, and retention. At an expanded scale and reach, this ability becomes even more important.

Updated awareness of technological advancements is critical for retail expansion. There is no harm in taking external assistance from any qualified and experienced retail consulting agency.

The physical-infrastructural aspects have far-reaching strategic ramifications for achieving retail store expansion. The selection of store locations, the layout planning of stores and warehouses, the nature of shelving and storage capabilities in stores, required technological assets and capabilities, operations planning, and compatibility with supply chain factors are some of the key considerations in giving shape and form to the physical infrastructural framework of a retail enterprise. However, if considered from the perspective of growth and expansion in future, this physical infrastructural framework cannot be framed only considering what is relevant today. Thus, the strategies governing the creation of this physical infrastructural framework play a determining role in business growth and expansion endeavours.

If store location is considered – it is something that remains fixed over long periods. In the event of retail store expansion in the future, there must be room to accommodate such developments. So, store locations cannot be decided merely on the basis of today’s requirements. Room need not necessarily mean in physical terms. For example, expansion could also come in the form of eCommerce adoption which does not necessarily lead to the doubling of the in-store spatial requirements.

Another example could be a small electronic and electrical store. It might be a small store today but it may have the vision of expanding its offerings to include bigger products like televisions, refrigerators and washing machines. It immediately affects the layout planning of that store. For example, the store would need bigger entry and exit points for handling such large-sized inventory. It would apply to its warehouse(s) as well.

Organisation Structuring

Retail expansion and growth come in a myriad of forms like the adoption of eCommerce, adding features of omnichannel, establishment of new branches, expansion of existing store area to include new offerings, franchisee-based expansion, etc. It is not difficult to comprehend that with scale and expansion, making necessary changes in the organisational design and structure becomes necessary.

We help design robust and flexible organisational designs and structures aimed at not only meeting existing business requirements but also accommodating changes in the event of defined growth and expansion. Our goal is to build robust organisations that can handle and integrate the demands and complexities of existing and new business requirements emanating from scale and expansion. There are also aspects of change management involved when a business goes through transformation. Having the right organisational design and structure helps in managing such changes as well.

Establishing Job Descriptions and Key Performance Indicators

It is not difficult to comprehend that when a business embraces growth and expansion, the roles and responsibilities of employees must also undergo appropriate changes. Every position in an organisation structure is affected in one or the other for enabling an enterprise to smoothly fulfil its new business requirements. Also, accommodating growth and expansion often necessitates the creation of new roles and the abolition or amalgamation of old and new roles within organisation structures. These changes affect two areas in people management in big ways – job descriptions and KPIs.

We define job descriptions keeping in mind a wide range of factors. Here, alignment with growth and expansion strategies is our foremost prerogative. We understand that scale and expansion can bring many unseen developments for which it becomes necessary that JDs are designed not only in light of immediate conditions but also to meet to embrace probable flexibilities.

In formulating the KPIs, we work closely with our clients to identify the critical success factors (CSFs) for their growth and expansion strategy. We try to keep the KPIs as direct as possible (in adherence to the SMART principle) minimising the distance between progress measurement and projected results. We also define how these metrics should be monitored and reported for actionable decision-making towards improving performances. We do keep in mind that KPIs are also useful for employees to have a clear understanding of what they should be striving to achieve following which directions and benchmarks. KPIs provide a much-needed sense of direction to one’s efforts. In the backdrop of scale and expansion, KPIs help bring clarity to employees at all levels and soothe their performance-related doubts and concerns.

Defining SOPs

Having a defined operations framework is critical to effectively manage routine business affairs as well as to build the foundation of operations planning that can support business requirements at higher and bigger levels. Formulating robust business process solutions has been YRC’s speciality since its inception. Our approach is governed by fundamentals and methodologies refined over a decade of working on diverse retail and eCommerce expansion projects. To make a long story short, we craft Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). SOPs tell how something should be done. Having SOPs provides a defined operations framework helping organisations carry out every simple and complex process with precision. SOPs help simplify and standardise business processes. Having SOPs means there can be consistency in operations across all locations and channels. Knowing how to carry out business processes in the best-known way goes easy on resource utilisation. Having an SOP-based operations framework ensures that the best ways to execute business operations are known and that they can be replicated elsewhere when the same conditions prevail. Think of SOPs like a certified vaccine. They are designed to work out as planned in every intended entity towards creating the desired outcomes.

In the journey of defining SOPs, we carry out as-is process mapping, process gap analysis, process design, process streamlining and optimisation, (analysing) the scope of technological implications and automation, and SOP-IT integration. We also provide SOP implementation support for a smooth transition. We also chart solutions for auditing SOPs and improving them over time for enhanced alignment with specific business needs. We maintain that once a business enterprise is process-oriented from the core by using SOPs, it can handle retail store expansion with operational grace and meticulousness.

Technology Consulting

In technology consulting, we help clients establish how technology is going to be a part of their businesses and power their growth and expansion endeavours. In other words, we help frame the technology strategy, build the technology implementation roadmap, and provide implementation support accommodating current and projected business requirements.

Our team of retail advisory experts carries out necessary assessments of the current business operations and requirements and existing technological infrastructure and capabilities. These assessments are crucial to understand where a business stands today in terms of technology and decode what kind of technologies will be required to accommodate projected scale and expansion in the future like the adoption of eCommerce and omnichannel capabilities. We help clients identify the best-fit technological solutions and assist them in their technology implementation and digital transformation journeys. We also offer assistance in vendor selection.

Technology Integration

A crucial aspect of any tech strategy is the roadmap for the integration of technologies. When new technologies are adopted, they must be aligned and integrated with the existing business processes and technology infrastructure. We address this with our SOP-IT integration services and close coordination with vendors for data migration and delivering final ready-to-use technology solutions.

We provide expert assistance in addressing two critical areas concerning the physical infrastructure of retail enterprises – location strategy and layout planning for stores and warehouses.

In location strategy and analysis, our objective is to help our retail clients find suitable store and warehouse locations with future scale and expansion under consideration. In doing so, we study and analyse a wide range of factors covering:

• Target demographics
• Proximity to customer bases
• Buyer personas
• Visibility and accessibility for customers, traffic and connectivity, parking facilities
• Presence of competitors, nature of competition
• Market saturation
• Branding and positioning objectives
• Operational suitability
• Status of public infrastructural services like roads and the internet
• Real-estate prices
• Severity of regulatory compliance
• Ease of doing business

In layout planning, we follow a planned and proven methodology that constitutes analysing and curating a long and diverse list of factors for arriving at the final layout recommendations. Some of the most important factors that we take into account and incorporate are highlighted below:

• Customer Experience
• Localisation
• Assortment
• Zone Classification
• Space Optimisation
• Motion Analysis
• Support to inventory management and other internal line and staff functions
• Safety and Security
• Checkout

As experienced retail consulting partners, we always maintain that these factors in layout planning affect the potential and preparedness of retail enterprises for growth and expansion.