Retail Industry Insights: Unleashing the Power of Store Planning, Reporting & Analytics

The retail landscape is drastically changing as consumer behavior and trends shift and new channels emerge. Retailers are either closing their stores or making strategic shifts to their business models to better align to the changing needs of the consumer. Despite recent headlines, Retail stores are not going anywhere, at least for the near term, which means retailers must fully understand and effectively manage their store performance.

 

The largest expense for retailers is establishing, maintaining, and enhancing the store base. Given the significance of the investment, even small performance improvements can have a critical impact on the overall health of the business. However, planning for and understanding the performance of the store base is difficult and manually intensive – often requiring detailed reports, data extracts and the manual collection of data to establish a holistic view of the store fleet.

Organizations often experience challenges around planning and measuring store performance:

  • Lack of common data repositories require planners to obtain data from many disparate and potentially inconsistent sources
  • Limited ability to plan and report on stores with common characteristics (e.g., Comp/Non-Comp, Format, Vintage, etc.)
  • Outdated planning, reporting, and analytic processes and tools that are unable to accommodate the scale and complexity required
  • Significant constraints around being able to perform modeling, conduct what-if analysis, and measure key strategic initiatives

The data for financial metrics, operational metrics, and labor are often stored in separate, siloed systems. So, how do you get the full picture of performance with data in so many different places?

For best-in-class retailers, establishing a platform for store planning, reporting and analytics can provide significant value – reducing the manual effort required to develop reporting, enabling deeper insight into key elements of store performance (financial and operational metrics) and empowering end users to spend time on more value-added analysis. Measuring and reporting on store performance provides the ability to plan revenue, expense, and measure key KPIs in a single solution. The ability to drill between each of them provides an integrated view of a store’s performance both from a historical perspective and a go-forward basis.

Key benefits retailers see in these solutions:

  • Robust planning, analysis and reporting for store groups including Comp vs. Non-Comp Stores, resulting in better alignment between strategic targets and store plans
  • Standardized data and calculations provides more accurate, flexible and tactical planning capability
  • Reduced cycle-time for creating total Store P&Ls, allowing more time for review, analysis and more comprehensive planning
  • Enhanced reporting and analytic capabilities for distribution across the organization from a centralized data repository, where planned global assumptions and other business drivers are stored
  • Integration of data between Store Operations, Logistics and Corporate functions, resulting in one version of the truth

Contact us to learn more about how we have partnered with Retail organizations just like yours to improve their overall Store performance through enhanced Store Planning, Reporting and Analytics.

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