Achieving Success in the Big, Bad World of Retail
By Rakhee Nagpal
Delhi, Nov 13, 2008 1445 hrs IST

Today's retail environment is tough. Shrinking budgets, layoffs, consolidation, and demanding construction schedules mean that you have to do more with less time, less money, and less staff. To get stores designed, built, renovated, and maintained on time and on budget, it is highly critical to work smarter than your competitors and stay connected with the 3 core elements of effective retailing - People, Process & Technology.

If you have found yourself in a situation where the process seems to change, accountabilities are uncertain and deadlines are missing, then perhaps you have a people, process, and technology problem. Getting all 3 aligned is absolutely essential in ensuring a process change will work.

And they have to be resolved in that order, i.e. people, process, and then technology

People: Identify the key issues -- who owns the process, who is involved, what are their roles, are they committed to improving it and working together and importantly are they prepared to do the work to fix the problem. It is important to stay connected with retail professionals in the industry to maintain a good talent rate. The industry needs to focus on maturity of their human practices, guide a program of continuous human resource management, focus on improving individual and team capabilities, integrate people process improvement with business process improvement, establish a culture of performance and professional excellence and align human resource strategies with business goals.

Also we have ignored the knowledge creation or research aspect of our educational system for too long. Creating a culture of research and innovation requires a significant commitment and a long-term view from all stakeholders. This is a fantastic example of an industry-academia linkage necessary to create the next generation of knowledge workers. This global initiative will certainly provide a path to success for companies worldwide through new business initiatives related to performance excellence.

Process: A process can be defined as starting with a trigger event that creates a chain of actions that results in something being prepared for a customer of that process. Starting at a high level and identifying the key big steps is important to see the process from end to end and then moving into more detail to capture the various layers involved and various exceptions. Focusing on the high frequency transactions (Pareto principle) can have significant benefits to standardizing the process. But also remember that it can be the non-standard transactions where service is slipping most, or the potential for significant failure in the process may exist.

Technology: Now that people are aligned, and the processes developed are clarified, technology can be applied to ensure consistency in application of the process and to provide the thin guiding rails to keep the process on track - to make it easier to follow the process than not do so.

Of course there is much more to getting a technology project right - but get the above three sorted out and you will be a fair way down the path to achieving business success. Great retail technologies and business solutions are about much more than clever application. These end-to-end integrated business applications provide retail businesses around the world with the extra edge over its competitors. It is about blending the right software with experienced people that understand retail and can offer a great service before, during and after implementation. But most of all it's about you, your business, and putting your vision of what you want to achieve into practice.


The importance of retaining talent

While we accept that most of today's retail businesses are talent driven and that people are our biggest assets, historically, (at least with IT) organizations have focused more on proactively improving their delivery processes and their investments in technology.

In fact, the current global hue-and-cry on talent shortfalls and high attrition rates in the retail industry are only the tip of the iceberg. At the business level, there are imperatives like improving productivity, moving-up the value chain, enhancing competitiveness and getting closer to the customers. At the organization level, issues like managing a multi-cultural and multi-geographical workforce and managing rapid growth continue to take a large mind-share of business leaders and HR professionals.

So, it is not good enough to win the 'talent wars'. It is also not enough to try solutions (like business process reengineering, employee stock options, assessment centres and 360-degree appraisals) in a piece-meal manner. Instead, the need of the hour is to take a holistic view of the organization's business, culture, technology, and talent needs. And adapt solutions based on an integrated and proactive approach towards developing and engaging talent and growing the business.

Retail organizations need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their current human resource management practices in order to understand what steps should be taken to improve them. The organization can then relate its strengths and weaknesses of its practices with the best practices indicated in the model, which helps the organization to prioritize their improvement actions and focus on changes that are most beneficial in the near term while having a roadmap for the long term objective.