Project Description
Improved Product Development and New Planning Processes Drive Retail Success
Client Challenge
The client is a $100 million privately-held retailer with catalog and ecommerce channels, selling quality women’s fast fashion clothing, accessories, and footwear. Customers predominately shop on the retailer’s website. The company operated one catalog or event at a time without a fiscal planning tool or approach. Further, the cross-functional teams worked in silos, and many redundant inefficiencies existed in the product development process. The client needed improved product development and retail planning processes and tools to grow as a competitive, digital-first business model.​
Parker Avery Solution
The Parker Avery Group worked closely with the retailer to review and assess its legacy environment and improve its product development and planning processes, focusing on the following key activities:​
- Current-state and gap analysis​
- Company milestone process benchmarked against leading and industry-standard processes​
- Solution and capability improvements appropriate for the retailer’s size and environment​
- Future process and systems landscape​
- Project plan, processes, tools, and people required to begin the modernization effort​
- Implementation roadmap development ​for the new capabilities
- Integration of all cross-functional teams​
Key project outcomes included:​
- Nearly 50% reduction in inefficiencies and redundancies due to an improved product development process ​
- Fully integrated fiscal planning throughout the product development process​
- Industry-standard business monitoring process and tools​
- Definition of streamlined roles and responsibilities for all functions​
- Outline of benefits and rationale for the changes to secure executive buy-in​
Results
With Parker Avery’s help, the retailer’s improved product development and milestone process now commences with company goals and financial objectives and fully integrates all teams and activities. ​Reducing redundancies and clearly defined roles and responsibilities helped streamline the activities needed to develop financial plans, create products, and ultimately market to customers. ​
The retailer’s leadership embraced the strategic changes and championed the training of their teams, which led to a higher adoption rate and healthy organizational change overall.
Let’s make your product development processes and tools more effective.
You may also like
