Essential new ways to unify your people, data, and process for unfair advantage
Why do you need value drivers?
In this an example, a retailer has around 200 stores, operating on slim margins. They’ve used strategies to reduce overheads and improve cross-channel selling, including using poorer performing stores as online fulfilment centers, and using pop-up stores to shift slow-moving stock.
These were fine strategies, but hit snags in execution. The information shared between management and operations, didn’t clearly articulate the plan, or provide enough feedback, so neither management nor operations really understood how they were going.
This year management are starting again.
The disconnect between strategy and execution played out again.
Existing divisions couldn’t change their existing practices, and work together effectively to bring about goals.
Each business department filtered and interpreted the goals into language they could understand. If the goal related to an area outside their business function, they ignored it. Departments didn’t understand or value what other parts of the business where doing, because the information they shared with each other used no common terms of reference.
It’s normal for operational budgeting and planning to be seen as a task based on prior year data, instead of an opportunity to communicate strategy.
If departments operate in silos and focus on their own business function, they have no common language in the retail value-drivers that they measure themselves against.
At best, they risk losing out on opportunities to work together to achieve common corporate goals.
At worst, they work against each other, measuring their own performance against conflicting KPIs while your laudable strategic goals end up diffused, delayed, and disrupted.
Withholding information hurts efficiency. It also hurts sales. In fact, information asymmetry often stops a sale. Not enough information is often why the shopper puts the product back on the shelf.
The gap between how a brand (tries) to present itself, and how a consumer actually perceives it comes down to alignment. To provide a consistent experience to the customer, you must ensure business departments align with each other, and with your strategy.
This is Part 3 in a series on retail value-drivers, how companies use them in planning, reporting and analysis and lessons for mid-sized retailers to punch above their weight and better share information.
Start with Part 1 here
The gap between how a retailer (tries) to present itself, and how a consumer actually perceives it comes down to alignment. To provide a consistent experience to the customer, you must ensure business departments align with each other, and with your strategy.
While business divisions exist for different reasons, how they report, analyze and plan is very similar. By unifying these activities using and agile platform, departments can collaborate using common value drivers on shared data.
the naked leaf 