Project Description
Streamlined merchandising and marketing business processes to improve internal collaboration and efficiencies, as well as support future system implementations
The Client
An American big box retail chain carrying over 50,000 unique SKUs across furniture, seasonal, and home décor products throughout 235 retail stores in 40 states as well as online.
The Challenge
The client’s significant growth trajectory, coupled with recent system implementations, created a heightened need for increased collaboration, standardized business processes, and clear roles and responsibilities.
Contributing to inefficiencies in their current timeline and practices, the client had not merged their merchandising and marketing calendars. This lack of collaboration hampered the company’s path to a cohesive customer experience. The teams were further challenged in their cross-functional communications, repetitively generating the same information for different audiences with unclear timelines and expectations.
The client also wanted to enhance the business units’ visibility to the leadership team’s vision. Management wanted to provide their teams with streamlined and standardized tools and processes and increase the value of their employees’ time by shifting to a more strategic role focus with heavier emphasis on value-add activities.
The Parker Avery Solution
Parker Avery conducted an in-depth assessment of the client’s “as-is” merchandising and marketing business processes. Key project activities included:
- Reviewed the merchandising and marketing calendars for inefficiencies across essential activities and supporting tools
- Identified information and communication inhibitors to corporate growth and accountability
- Guided cross-functional workshops to outline future-state requirements
- Analyzed current merchandising reporting capabilities
- Reviewed roles and responsibilities related to milestones
In partnership with the client, Parker Avery broke down silos across the organization to promote strategic collaboration and efficiencies, delivering:
- An integrated timeline with milestones to support both merchandising and marketing
- Standardized weekly business reporting tools
- Revamped assortment curation process focused on increased collaboration and decreased formal meetings to minimize future assortment fall-out
- Documented roles and responsibilities and major cross-functional activities (process maps, meeting guides, activity sheets)
- Reporting to collect vital sales and product data with reduced need for manual work
- Strategic alignment forms to increase focus on financial targets and integrate company-wide and divisional views of key customer strategies
- Communication plan and strategy for the rollout of new business tools and processes
- Online training course for the end-to-end process
The Result
The client now has a holistic, integrated calendar that vastly improves collaboration and communication. Their new streamlined merchandising and marketing business process is also the backbone that will support forthcoming system implementations. As the client onboards new employees and encounters needs for refreshing current employees on key calendar milestones, they also have a modern training platform that will promote sustainment of the new processes within the organization.
