From Inventory to Checkout: End-to-End Retail Process Transparency with Signavio + LeanIX + WalkMe

Today’s retail industry, in order to be successful you must gain visibility into all processes, from inventory restock to checkout in their entirety. Without the visibility of each aspect of the inventory management process, retailers are presented with stockouts, inefficiencies, lost sales opportunities, and poor customer experiences. As competition increases, there must be real-time visibility into inventory, order fulfillment, and customer experience to ensure operational excellence and opportunities for incremental profits.

“End to end” visibility across the process helps retailers see what is happening with their inventory, effectively manage their omnichannel operations, or see how well operations are communicating as it relates to inventory. With Signavio, LeanIX, and WalkMe, retailers can build a cohesive ecosystem that will allow processes, technology, and people to work together. Signavio will help visualize and optimize retail workflows, LeanIX will help show how the IT landscape and ERP are aligned, WalkMe will help employees and customers adopt the tools with ease.

This centralized approach provides retailers with the visibility to effectively eliminate bottlenecks, silos in operations, and inconsistent shopping journeys between in-person and digital ways, by increasing growth and loyalty.

Role of Signavio in Optimizing Inventory Workflows

Signavio is crucial to increasing visibility in inventory systems and supporting inventory workflows. Retailers can use the Signavio inventory workflows to generate actionable insights to improve procurement, warehouse management, and replenishment processes.

Some of Signavio’s features to optimize inventories are:

• Map to process: map every step of the process from the moment stock arrives until it is checked out
• Detect bottlenecks: show delays in stock allocation
• Simulate scenarios: allow testing of “what-if” inventory SQL before making decisions
• Real-time track availability: to this day, not all retailers have visibility on stock availability across multiple locations

For example, if a product is listed out-of-stock frequently Signavio would allow an analysis of the delays at the supplier level, warehouse processes, and replenishment from forecasted demand.

Retailers build an ability to lower carrying costs, avoid stockpiling issues, and improve the movement of goods across channels. In a competitive retail space, inventory control ensures customers are able to reliably find what they want when they want it, which solidifies loyalty and increases revenue.

How LeanIX Simplifies the Retail IT Landscape

Managing retail IT systems can be complicated, particularly when managing multiple points of sale (POS) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and e-commerce channels. LeanIX provides retailers with the tools needed to gain insight into their retail IT landscape, offering retailers visibility that allows them to make more informed decisions.

Benefits of LeanIX retail IT:

• Application portfolio management: To understand the full breadth of every IT asset within your organization, across departments
• Cloud integration insights: To keep track of SaaS subscriptions and reduce redundancy
• Retail ERP transparency: To ensure all data is flowing seamlessly from ERP, to POS, to online
• Cost optimization: To find where tools overlap and reduce costs

By eliminating the guesswork with a visual representation of application dependencies LeanIX simplifies IT governance and expedites ERP migrations. Within the LeanIX ecosystem, organizations are positioned to align with Signavio’s process insights to leverage technology with operational vision.

This alignment between IT and business activities positions retailers to eliminate down time, refine workflows, and establish a single source of truth across systems, which is an important process toward establishing omnichannel strategies.

WalkMe for Seamless Store and Staff Adoption

Consolidation of advanced retail technologies, such as ERP systems, POS systems, and inventory management systems, often fails if the workforce and customers are not able to adapt to the technology. Where WalkMe comes into play is in supporting retailers driving adoption in stores, through simplification of onboarding, training, and daily utilization. WalkMe’s digital adoption platform, ensures employees, store managers, and customers can easily navigate complex systems, leading to enhanced overall operational efficiencies.

Onboarding employees to use new software and tools can be intimidating, but WalkMe trust helps empower retail employees in utilizing new software and tools through in-application, real-time support that removes confusion and mitigates errors; often ensuring employees get interactive instructions within the applications they are using to augment faster onboarding and productivity. For retailers looking to deploy a new ERP or POS platform WalkMe can take the anxiety out of new software implementations; WalkMe provides contextual tips and walkthroughs to both assisting staff and customers alike in conducting their daily work, including allowing for seamless transitions over the dreaded training sessions with staff.

WalkMe also creates additional adoption for customer-facing adoption of technology, during e-commerce checkouts, or while shopping via a self-checkout, guiding busy shoppers to complete their transaction quickly with minimal friction. Together with Signavio’s aim in optimizing processes for retail transformation, and LeanIX’s enhancement of IT transparency over the retail process, WalkMe ensures the human aspect of a retail transformation is being considered. In which, creates faster operational readiness, lower disruption as staff and customers become familiar with the changes, and a more consistent and personalized shopping experience across all versions of the new retail conversion.

Achieving Retail ERP Transparency Across Operations

ERP systems are the backbone of modern retail but without visibility data silos and inefficiencies form within the organization. Bringing Signavio inventory workflows into LeanIX retail IT mappings and enabling WalkMe adoption tools produces true retail ERP transparency.

How this effect’s retail operations:

• Centralizes product, pricing and inventory data
• Incorporates supply chain, finance and sales channels
• Minimizes delays caused by manual reporting
• Provides up to date dashboards for decision-making

Signavio helps determine which processes are inefficient, LeanIX makes sure IT systems support all ERP integrations, and WalkMe helps empower employees to use ERP tools correctly.

When retailers reach full transparency of the ERP they improve inventory accuracy, improve financial reporting, and become responsive to customers at an unfathomable and rapid pace. Transparency can create end-to-end visibility and make resilient retail operations that are fundamentally prepared for immediate, complex, and changing market demand.

Supply Chain-to-Checkout Alignment: Why Integration Matters

It’s imperative for retailers to attain alignment across the supply chain to checkout to maximize efficiency and profitability. Whenever supply and pricing are misaligned, retailers experience stockouts, lost sales, and dissatisfied customers. Today’s retail experience is connected throughout the entire process. The movement of goods must start from supplier orders, moves through to the store shelf, and ultimately end at checkout – seamlessly, without gaps or period of elongation.

Signavio plays a critical role in documenting and optimizing supply chain processes that will also notify where there are inefficiencies that may disrupt or delay order fulfilment and restocking of inventory. LeanIX ensures that the underlying IT landscape supports that flow, with connection between the logistics system, ERPs, and POS systems all circulating order and inventory data in real-time. WalkMe is the missing human layer that assists the retailer’s staff in addressing changes to workflows, updates within their operating systems, or new checkout technologies, so their services to customers can be minimally disrupted.

Everyone, staff and customers, will benefit through this orchestration, building an operation whereby inventory flow can be accurately predicted, restocking can occur more rapidly, and it is easier to find availability across multiple surfaces. Customers will have faster checkouts, be it in-store or on-line, and retailers will have stronger vitality against disruptions. End-to-end alignment, and an open-mind to all parts of the operations means improvements in prediction and forecasting, lowered operating cost, and synergy aligned with a consumer first retail experience.

Benefits of Combining Signavio, LeanIX & WalkMe for Retailers

When retailers leverage Signavio, LeanIX, and WalkMe, they create a collaborative environment that positions process, technology, and people as an aligned force. Each solution provides associated yet distinct parts of retail transparency while representing an integrated framework for growth.

Signavio provides process visibility through a data-driven view on the workflows of procurement, replenishment, and checkout. LeanIX provides visibility on the IT landscape, ensuring systems including ERP, POS, and e-commerce are integrated, cost-effective, and ready for the future. WalkMe closes the adoption gap to ensure that employees are using the fulfilling their jobs with confidence in technology, effectively decreasing errors and increasing speed.

Together, these platforms give retailers real value. They create efficiencies in operations, reduce inaccuracies in inventory, enhance customer experiences, and increase employee productivity. Retailers also gain the ability to help them scale faster with lower costs, as process visibility and IT transparency reduce the risk of growth.

About YRC

YRC (Your Retail Coach) is dedicated to helping retailers worldwide make better business decisions using SAP Signavio and proven business transformation frameworks. YRC has decades of retail industry subject matter expertise and process excellence that connects strategy with technology. We help retailers adapt quicker, operate smarter, and provide a better experience for their customers.