Category: Retail Operations and Management

Retail payroll management poses a significant challenge due to its multifaceted nature. The complexities range from adhering to complex overtime rules to calculating individual employee deductions. Managing these manually can be daunting. Consequently, many brands are turning to retail payroll software to streamline this area. Below, we explore some of the challenges retail brands face in payroll management and how retail payroll software can offer solutions.   

Challenges: 

1. Low employee retention: The retail industry often sees frequent employee turnovers. This constant flux in the workforce complicates the maintenance of an error-free payroll.
2. Complicated hours calculation and scheduling: Retail employees often work part-time or may have to extend in certain situations. So, it is extremely difficult to track their work hours manually and calculate their payroll based on their attendance and work hours.  
3. Variable overtime rules: Overtime rules in the retail industry change with the location, making them even more difficult to track and manage. Effectively managing a payroll would mean ensuring that the retailer complies to the overtime rules in a particular location.
4. Benefits and deductions: Retail employees can be eligible for additional benefits, such as health insurance, bonuses and more. A person involved with payroll management has to keep accurate track of the deductions for each employee and also manage these benefits. 
5. Delays in payroll processing: The complications involved in payroll management can sometimes lead to delays in processing the payroll. This results in significant dissatisfaction among employees and may even lead to compliance problems. Efficient payroll management ensures that all employees receive their due payments on time. 

Solutions offered by software:

1. Automated time and attendance: Payroll management systems can easily keep track of work hours for retail industry employees, regardless of whether they are working part-time or overtime. 
2. Calculating leave pay and managing leaves:  Instead of manually tracking which employees qualify for leave pay, retail businesses can entrust these intricate calculations to payroll management systems.
3. Flexible pay calculation setup: Instead of following a stringent rule when it comes to pay calculations, some payroll management software offers a more customizable approach. The retail brand is free to define pay as it sees fit. So, the company does not require external support for maintenance and pay definition.
4. Analyze data to find discrepancies: Such software allows brands to analyze data from previous and current payrolls to identify any errors or inaccuracies. 
5. Integration with Sub Ledgers and General Ledger: Systems that are integrated with Sub and General Ledgers increases operational efficiency by standardizing certain parts of the payroll management. 
6. Customized payroll runs: Some retail brands may prefer weekly or fortnightly payroll runs. The software for payroll management can allow for such customizations, providing increased flexibility. The retailer can stick to their policy without being limited by the system.
7. Employee self-service: Employees can also use these systems to look up their payslips, leaves remaining and many other relevant data. 

Looking for payroll software for retail?

Explore Retail ViVA. Its Payroll Management Systems are bundled together as part of a unified human resource module in the ERP system. The payroll management module is capable of handling every part of a successful payroll run. From calculation of attendance and time to finding out the statutory deductions in pay revisions, the system ensures accuracy and comfortable pay runs.  

Retailers: Are You an Intelligent or a Responsive Retailer?

Retail is the largest B2C industry in the world, generating nearly USD25 trillion in revenue. With the onset of smartphones in 2010, the retail sector has seen an extensive transformation, with almost every business segment doing well, except a few. Mobile and e-commerce segments thrived while physical stores continue to dominate as usual

An Intelligent Retailer creates the best digital systems and processes to serve its customers the best and aspires to achieve competitive positioning in the marketplace. The intelligence of the Intelligent Retailer comes from its intelligence-gathering through data analytics. However, if such an intelligent retailer is not agile, it may take some time for the intelligent retailer to change to new normal. A Responsive Retailer responds to customer’s buying behaviour in real-time, thereby keeping a watchful eye on the shifting market trends and still strive to be an Intelligent Retailer. A responsive retailer is always agile, quick to change parallel to the evolving dynamics with consumer preferences or market vagaries or regulatory constraints.

What is an Intelligent Retailer?

According to Lexis-Nexis, an Intelligent Retailer is one who, through data, facilitates decision-making by considering customer needs in context. It is based on Intelligent Analysis, where cognitive technology uses analytics to create contextual understanding. This enables the retailer to understand consumer behaviour, purchase preferences and make offers that are relevant and attractive to the customers. It further helps the Retailer to make automatic product recommendations to the customers for her/his emerging lifestyle requirements.

What is a Responsive Retailer?

A Responsive Retailer is always responsive to the changing dynamics of the marketplace and is willing to change rapidly to match the changing needs of the consumers. The Responsive Retailer must take consumer preferences and market conditions and respond immediately to these changes. Further, the Responsive Retailer is ever ready to meet the new normal in a digital-first world. A Responsive Retailer operates with efficient digital systems, processes, and people to serve consumers the best they expect it to be served, all of them being very agile and self-configurable in minutes. The Responsive Retailer does not solely depend on consumer journey mapping but agile and dynamic enough for the strategy and execution around meeting all customer needs, including the unexpected.

The Difference Between Responsive and Intelligent

In a way, both Responsive and Intelligent retailers are independent of each other and can be used together. However, the problem lies in converting that capacity to serve the business with responsive or intelligent retail marketing and sales in their respective roles. However, they work in harmony and complement each other to create a genuinely empowered customer base who is willing to share their valuable market information with retailers to understand the brands better. In an intelligent retailing environment, retailers can deliver personalized, relevant, and dynamic offers to the customers to know their preferences, moods, needs, and demands. Responsive means that retailers are every ready to act upon customer needs through their agile process methods in the quickest possible time, almost instant to customer’s changing needs.

Retail ViVA, the Best of Both Worlds

By understanding the retailer’s needs and looking for the best of both worlds, we built a Retail ERP architecture that would deliver a unique experience on both eCommerce and brick & mortar in an omnichannel way combining intelligence and responsiveness. Our CodeSelfie NoCode platform-driven Retail ViVA provides the dynamic responsiveness wherein Retailers can make changes to their systems and process through self-configuration without needing to write a single line of code.

Conclusion

It is not about being an Intelligent or Responsive retailer. It is about adapting to change. Agility and responsiveness must be built into the system from the beginning of the journey. Just as a rubber band has an elastic property, a system also needs an elastic property to respond to changes. If an Intelligent Retailer’s systems cannot be changed dynamically for new emerging needs almost instantly, the intelligent retailers start losing their position only to see a responsive retailer has captured the market. Hence, Retailers must adopt a Retail ERP system that is not only intelligent enough but also equally responsive enough to win the new game of a successful 21st-century enterprise.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

The buzzword of Open-To-Buy occupies every merchandiser’s mind to save on dollars. Open-To-Buy not only helps maximize sales dollars but also minimizes cost dollars. It is an essential tool for Retailers to improve their financial performance. Small Retailers struggle to make their merchandise budget and often buy based on surmise. Big Retailers struggle with bulky worksheets as Retail ERP software does not offer the Open-To-Buy concept as part of their core modules. Some software provides it as an add-on module with poor integration.

What is Open-To-Buy?

Open-To-Buy is a concept to bring more transparency into the retail business. It is a tool that addresses the most critical question of how much to replenish and when to replenish stocks as they deplete. Retailer’s significant investment goes into their inventory buys, and Open-To-Buy addresses how much to buy. It is always future-oriented and adjusts the plan based on past trends and the vendor’s history of supplies. It is derived based on sales budgets to procurement budgets to actual sales in dollar terms. Often, an Open-To-Buy is combined with an assortment plan to answer both questions of how much to buy and which items to buy in each inventory category. Open-To-Buy is not used for daily basics or essentials as they go by standard replenishment at re-order levels.

Open-To-Buy in Retail

Open-to-Buy starts with a transparent planning process. Planning is the cornerstone of the Open-To-Buy concept. A sales plan or budget is prepared period-wise, sometimes even week being the tiniest period, but most take a month as a period. After a good sales plan is ready, an inventory plan is prepared to match the sales plan. The critical question here is how much inventory do I need to keep supporting subsequent period sales? Based on stock on hand and expected movement of stock, an inventory receipt plan is made, and vendor purchase orders are finalized ultimately. Several other inventory adjustments like markdowns, adjustments, one-time bulk sales, etc., are also considered while arriving at the inventory replenishment question.

How can you Implement an Open-To-Buy Strategy in your store?

Open-To-Buy is a collaborative partnership where both the retailers’ suppliers and the merchandisers work together. It is a solid strategy to minimize and manage inventory costs. In Retail ViVA, our Retail ERP, we have created an integrated merchandising module that provides full-fledged Open-To-Buy Store Inventory Functionality to help your store generate profit. Inventory replenishment ordering is so automated that merchandisers can efficiently function and place an order on time to receive goods on time. A sale lost due to lack of inventory at the store can well turn out to a customer loss permanently, and thus the availability of inventory items at the store plays a crucial role in customer loyalty and experience.

Conclusion

Customers are cost and time-conscious. So, you can implement Open-To-Buy with precise analytics to track return on investments on your inventory assets. Further, Open-To-Buy can help merchandisers plan better with optimum inventory holding without facing the risk of stock-outs.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

3 min read

Decision-making is a process of our brain, helping us to choose one of the several alternate options available to us while considering an action. In our decision-making process, we may realize soon that we made a wrong decision and our brain then understands and self-learns not to make that decision again due to prior bad experience. We as humans, have self-learning capabilities, thus.

In busy business enterprises like Retail, where customers come in and go, and transactions happen every second and minutes, there are interactions between customers and operating employees. Some of these interactions may involve some decision-making for the disposal of customer requests. There could also be decisions concerning supply chain, employee matters, governance matters or be it any functional matters that affect a Retail enterprise. Most employees, be it junior or senior management, are involved in day-to-day decision making to discharge their duties. Some of them could be critical that we just can’t go wrong even once

If you digitize your operations, we can lessen the human decision-making process to a greater extent. We can attempt automation in three different ways:

1. Complete Automation: The whole business process is automated, and any involved decision-making is codified for the automation to make it as per logical business rules. This means there are fixed combinations that are codified, and so long situation falls into one of those codified ones, the decision is automatically made and transactions processed

2. Systemize processes: This involves systemizing the procedures to operate consistently that every time it happens, it happens in the same manner. Also, whenever it happens, wherever it occurs and whoever handles it, it occurs in the same way. We hear examples of the systems and standards being uniform across McDonald’s and customer experience being the same all across the world. The decision making here is codified by way of motions and methods and thrust is given to training resources in a manner until they get to operate in a set manner

3. Simplification of processes: Another method that can be considered is the simplification of operations in such a way that decision making is simple and there are no myriads of combinations that may merit consideration, limiting considerations to fix few. Simplification is complexity as much as one needs to understand and reduce unwanted options and prioritize just the most important ones

In digital transformation, Retailers need to ask which method to adopt for different processes. Some may be suitable for complete automation without human intervention, some may be systemized for consistency and experience and some may have to be simplified to realize time and efficiency. If digital transformation is attempted as a simple automation of processes as it is, it is pouring old wine in a new bottle

While designing Retail ViVA, we have cherry-picked each of the business processes to map where it would best fit keeping experience, control and efficiency in mind and have either automated it or systemized it or simplified it.

A good Retail Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product is one that blends all the above decision-making varieties and more so, gives the flexibility to change as times change. Responsiveness is so vital that Retailers must be agile and need not be left with something that was designed rigidly. Every Retail enterprise, to survive the new generation of business models, must be sharp, agile, and responsive to new “normal.” Their ERP products also must be responsive and self-configurable to change as demand arises and operate with efficiency.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

A strategic plan is one that helps a corporate to navigate from its current Mission to envisioned Vision of the future. The strategic planning process is a long-term thinking exercise, broken down into short term and long-term tactics aligned with corporate culture and values. While the strategic planning happens at some level in Retail organizations, very few organizations can draw a process forward for its articulation across the length and breadth of their organization. If the strategy can’t be communicated to everyone, the time and money spent on the strategic planning exercise just goes waste. One Harvard Business Review study found that 95% of employees at most midsize to large companies don’t understand the strategy of the Company. Lack of communication is the primarily reason for this 

Most corporates do not have a smooth and fulfilling workplace communication method. Whoever sets the strategic plan, they do not have a credible communication channel or mechanism to communicate that down the line. The remote workforce does not get the context of strategic planning and is far from owning, involving and executing it. Finally, the strategic plan ends up in a spreadsheet and the creators’ update and analyze it periodically, without any informed participation by all in the organization 

One must examine the questions as to how a strategic plan will get aligned to the Mission and Vision of a corporate and how does the plan get integrated into the day-to-day works of every employee in Retail organization. After all, several critical components of a strategy get executed at the bottom of the pyramid in any organization. A corporate must drill down its strategic plan to levels of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and attach to various associates linked to their functions. While doing so, they must inter-align the larger picture of Mission and Vision to every KPI through which associates can gauge how their KPI achievement contributes ultimately to the Vision of a Corporate. This will not only help associates to know about the Vision but also develop a pride of having committed to the Vision of Corporate that she/he works. This pride will ultimately enhance engagement and long-term loyalty 

In building Retail ViVA, we created our Strategy module that links the Mission, Vision, Values, Strategic Plan, KPI and employee wise performance in a seamless manner that everyone is on the same page and aligns with that one purpose. It helps to achieve the ultimate corporate purpose of what is good for my company should be good for me as well and makes employees commit to the strategic plan with a sound understanding 

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com

Retail has evolved over the years. I have vivid memories of going to a store to buy things along with my mother. In the late 90s, I first encountered online shopping (web) in one of my foreign trips and had my first experience of web shopping. It was not that much fun then but still was an innovation that I could shop very distanced from the store. Then in 2008, Apple created its APP Store, and slowly from there, mobile application development started. I recollect reading in 2012 about the popularity of mobile applications for the first time, more than web and more usage of mobile apps for online purposes. We have seen three channels of trade in Retail, the store, the web, and mobile.

As different channels emerged, companies that were running old and legacy ERP systems struggled to cope up to online and did patch systems to present online as a discrete web development, unintegrated to their legacy ERP systems. Soon CIO and business users realized that they are unable to provide unified customer experience across channels. Alongside with the proliferation of technology and its adoption by younger generations, customer experience as a “movement” started gaining momentum. Customers were demanding good experience and repeated their purchase, where they felt good experience was the norm.

Retailers, who felt happy that they are offering omnichannel experience, fell short of providing unified commerce. Unified commerce is about unifying all platforms as if it is a single platform, both in the front-end experience as well as the back-end ERP applications of a Retailer. Most Retailers failed to unify their back-end for omni channel capabilities. Most often, they had multiple administrators managing store, web, and mobile configurations of offers, promotions, and discounts. Contradictions in offers were visible due to time lag in configuration updates.

While designing our Retail ViVA ERP, we kept the critical maxim of single administration for all channels, be it physical store or web or mobile. What customers see is the same across channels as administration is unified for all.

Unified commerce-enabled systems also provide visibility of stock company-wide, analytics of customer behaviours channel-wise, and thus facilitates more understanding of the customer from Retailers’ point of view. Any personalization can’t be attempted without the above basics. It is personalization that enhances customer experience and thus enhances customer retention.

Don’t settle for just Omnichannel enablement in your ERP, settle for unified commerce, and single administration of all channels. That’s key to the success of enabling excellent customer experience!!

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan

raguk@sathguru.com