Visibility and communication: How retailers are streamlining planning
Whether managing risk and compliance, retail media, marketing campaigns or allocating staffing resources, retailers are under growing pressure to meet the evolving needs of their consumers and stay ahead of competitors in a market flooded with promotions and campaigns.
“It can be a challenge finding the right time to address the fast-paced, often siloed organisational structure of retail businesses,” explains Gavin Watson, senior industry lead, Asia-Pacific, Japan at Monday.com.
A centralised solution
Monday.com is a multi-product platform that can empower retailers to streamline their workflows into a single, intuitive solution. Its AI-powered capabilities can also help retailers align on business objectives with measurable outcomes like OKRs and KPIs. The platform provides customisable templates that can be implemented quickly and supports endless use cases.
For retailers of any size that are collaborating in silos, strategic directives often lose clarity as they trickle through teams. Reporting becomes fragmented, and data collected manually can be outdated by the time it’s reviewed.
Retailers need to avoid silos
“Planning done in isolation creates information silos, explains Watson. Teams need to know what other teams are doing to reduce confusion and increase alignment.
For example, a marketing team might prepare an extensive Black Friday campaign – but if merchandising, online or in-store teams are unaware of key stock offers or promotions, then the customer experience can falter.
Watson says if a customer is attracted to a store by a promotional offer and cannot find the promotion, it can create a bad customer experience and may prompt them to visit a rival retailer.
Optimising retail media
Retail media – which offers brands a platform to advertise directly where purchasing decisions are made – is booming globally. Monday.com provides retailers with a unified place to manage, track, and report on retail media efforts in real time.
Retailers who have decided to introduce retail media need a plan to bring it into the business and report results through that framework to provide visibility for teams and departments, including management.
For example, in real-time, management may need to see how much retail media has been sold and how much progress has been made in serving sold media inventory, says Watson. “Or how planning is progressing for the 50-per-cent off offer scheduled to begin on Friday. Has it been set up in stores? Has the promotion been launched on TikTok? Have we got enough inventory? Have we set up point-of-sale media? Visibility and communication are key, and if I see that five stores have not set up the point of sale, let me communicate on Monday.com with the store to ensure it is done.”
Historically, such visibility would come through reports generated and put together for teams, but by the time you get the report, it is already outdated.
Range planning without spreadsheets, emails
Monday.com’s Work OS platform optimises efficiency and makes data easily accessible in real-time for teams to make more informed decisions, eliminating the need for vast volumes of spreadsheets, emails, or reports.
One of Monday.com’s customers, Officeworks, calculated that every time it undertook a range update – before deploying Monday.com – it took more than 635 spreadsheets covering all the categories and the changes and 10,000 emails to communicate changes to team members. “You can imagine the risk and the duplication,” says Watson.
Now, all of that process flows through Monday.com. A request for a range update comes in from the category team, and a workflow kicks off to notify the relevant team members who review it; then, within Monday.com, they have the visibility, they make the decisions, and then those decisions get communicated.
Assessing risk and compliance
The Monday.com platform can also help retailers manage and address risks, from product compliance to ESG.
“Monday.com has an approval process where you can annotate, markup, look at what’s on your product or your image, and have an audit trail and a process to manage that before that bit of content goes to production or manufacturing.”
He says there can be risks on many levels, from how the product is packed and described to the logos and colour profiles used. There are risks associated with ensuring companies comply with ESG or regulatory OH&S compliance, for example.
With so many moving parts, vendor approvals and processes, and data silos, for example, managing these risks can prove a challenge for some retailers. Monday.com is helping companies manage that by providing them with the necessary tech stack that gives them transparency on where – and where not – processes are in place.
How visibility and communication can drive growth
Visibility and communication are two essential drivers for optimising efficiency and growth for retailers, explains Watson.
“Monday.com is about streamlining workflows while creating transparency for companies so they can drive business goals at scale. It’s all about reviewing, creating, and refining better processes.”
The post Visibility and communication: How retailers are streamlining planning appeared first on Inside Retail Australia.