New Business Processes Improve Merchandising and Marketing Alignment​

This American big-box retail chain carries over 50,000 unique SKUs across furniture, seasonal, and home décor throughout 235 stores and online. ​ Their significant growth trajectory, coupled with recent system implementations, necessitated better collaboration,  standardized business processes, and organizational alignment. ​The lack of collaboration hampered the company’s path to a cohesive customer experience. Contributing to inefficiencies, the client had not merged their merchandising and marketing calendars. 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 a heavier emphasis on value-adding activities.

Parker Avery conducted an in-depth assessment of the client’s business processes​ to improve merchandising and marketing alignment: ​ ​

• Reviewed the merchandising and marketing calendars for inefficiencies across 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 milestone-related roles and responsibilities

In partnership with the client, Parker Avery promoted 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
• 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​