Execution Management — Maximizing Store Productivity

As retailers have expanded their chains of stores across larger geographies and ever increasing numbers of stores in different and far flung locations, they have experienced more issues with trying to execute corporate strategies and merchandising concepts at each store location. Store employees are not highly paid, there is typically high turnover among rank-and-file workers, and yet retailers send directives to their stores with the hope that all necessary projects and tasks will be accomplished on a timely and correct basis.

Making this more difficult is today's retail environment. Many retailers are finding it necessary to differentiate their stores from location to location to address different needs in the marketplace. For instance, a planogram or promotion scheduled for one set of stores may not work for a different set of stores. What's needed is an effective way to distribute and communicate specific tasks to specific stores (or groups of stores) that fits the overall merchandising plan. As retailers struggle to identify successful competitive differentiators, the pressure to have each store be unique, whether that is through SKU mix, layout, target demographics, etc., continues to grow. The old methods of communication are no longer effective in this environment – one planogram does not fit all.

Retailers have spent millions of dollars defining their brand, their pricing strategies, implementing key supply chain processes by improving forecasting and replenishment activities, and have initiated large IT initiatives to make sure they do all these activities as accurately as possible. Most of these initiatives are concerned with the items a retailer sells. Because of competition, there's been a huge focus on making sure the correct items are ordered, shipped, replenished, allocated, promoted, priced, and delivered to the store in the most cost effective manner possible. But, every bit as critical as these "merchandising processes" are in defining a retailers' brand and market, equally important is to properly execute corporate strategies in the stores. A strategy without execution or with poor execution is equivalent to having no strategy at all.