Implementation

If only software could simply be switched on and it magically and intuitively knew how your business wanted to work, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?  While we are working hard to make deploying software solutions ever easier into your business, there are still many stages in the process that benefit from the intervention of skilled consultants.

Planning and allocation systems in particular are notoriously tricky to embed into a retail organization – in many cases this is a by-product of their huge levels of flexibility.  Unlike merchandise management and financial systems, there are often no predetermined definitions of the data that is to be used and planned, with new and innovative calculations being regularly added.

The role of the implementation team is to help establish the new systems at the heart of your planning and allocation teams.  The goals include:

• Learning what practices give your company competitive advantage, and ensuring they are continued and enhanced in any new system
• Identifying the activities that are unnecessary or redundant, and removing them from the process
• Guiding you on reasonable industry standards and practices to help ensure that not only are you covering your unique elements of planning, but that you are addressing the fundamental components of retail planning
• Developing creative solutions to provide the company with clearer information to measure and direct

Different approaches

We are often asked, “How long is a typical implementation”?  Which is a bit like asking “How long is a piece of string”?

As is frequently stated it’s not length that matters, it’s the value it delivers…

Some organizations want to design a whole new way of working, across a cross functional set of teams, with multiple prototype, extended user acceptance testing, conference room pilots and staged go-lives to coincide with peak planning periods.

Others want to take a standard retail template, and change their existing process to match the chosen approach.

Despite the inherent differences of these approaches, some tasks are present across all plans; project management, documenting the desired approach, integration to the existing systems, training, and go-live support.  The emphasis and durations change, but the work still has to be done.

In all cases, the goal still remains the same, embed new planning and allocations solutions into the business and help the retailer get the best from it.