Problems of retail shops
The significant part of difficulties which occur in retail business is impossibility to enlarge the volume of business due to the fact that the personnel are not able to respond corporate standards and to provide a necessary speed of work. Everyone knows the situation when sales managers are busy looking for some certain item, when they spend a lot of time making records in invoices and finding the number of an item. Such problems are topical especially for not very big regional shops where besides the queues is also the lack of space and uncomfortable configuration of salesrooms. Queues can be the reason of customer traffic lowering.
What is the decision?
The decision of such problems is in retail business process description and creating of the system of personnel monitoring. The system should be consistent, controlled, and automated as much as it is possible. Correct description of business processes leads to improvement of organizational structure of retail shops and the system of service instructions.
Retail business as a complex of business processes
One of basic approaches to retail business is consideration of a retail shop as a complex of business processes. Such an approach helps to define business processes which need to be improved and to provide business process optimization if necessary. This lets managers to enlarge manageability of retail business, reduce time spent on customer assistance and satisfy requirements of shop visitors. Nowadays the main direction of business process optimization is a maximum combining of functions of several job positions of a shop in one point with the purpose to reduce the number of personnel and increase in customer service rate.
The main business processes of a retail shop:
- Assortment management
- Warehousing
- Provision of the process of choosing and merchandise payment in a salesroom
- Financial management
- Human resource management
- Safety and security arrangements
- Extra services provision
General directions of business process optimization:
- Acceleration of the processes (elimination of the process of weighing goods in a salesroom, integration of the processes of weighing and scanning a barcode);
- Reducing of the number of responsibility transfer points (store and warehouse management as a whole, without the transfer of responsibility for the goods);
- Reducing of the number of direct subordinates to the head of a retail shop (the head of a store should communicate with only three employees – director of procurement, chief accountant and salesroom manager).
Correct description of business processes simplifies retail shop automation and implementation of the software significantly. However, business process optimization often leads to changes in the system of personnel motivation, the necessity to pay more attention to personnel trainings, team building and corporate culture.