HighGear’s Professional Services team helped a client deploy HighGear as a global, retail management solution. One of the major benefits realized by the customer was how HighGear provided for two-way communication between retail locations around the globe and their Head Office in the United States.
One of the most important and key factors for a retail company to be successful is communication. Specifically, communication between the various retail locations and stores and the Corporate management team. Sites need to be able to communicate special orders and frustrated freight to Head Office. Corporate needs to communicate price changes, ads and promotions and event playbooks to stores. Over the entire organization, processes for new site setups and site closes need to be communicated with certain steps needing to be completed before others, while other steps can occur in parallel.
Taking Control of the Chaos
Most retail organizations have a number of back-end solutions which manage all of the aspects of the business. For example, systems to manage employees, warehouse(s) and Logistics are required, but having them as separate solutions makes it hard for users to identify tasks and for managers to pull reports to identify the state of each request. In this case, a central system that pulls all of the data into one place and provides task management, accountability, auditing and reporting, allows organizations to focus on a single solution to manage the communication required to be successful.
HighGear is able to integrate with other solutions and provides a central process and task management solution, ensuring timely completion and accountability all in a single location.
For example:
HighGear assisted the customer in the setup and configuration of a Planogram process. In short, a planogram is the design of a store shelf. It identifies on which level a product should reside and what location and width it should take. For example, 2-liter Cokes go on the shelf that is eye level and should take up to 4 bottles wide.
The issue that the customer had with their process was that they were using e-mail to manage all of the steps and approvals for new planograms.
The process was stored in the heads of the employees from different departments and most departments only knew their specific steps. This also made onboarding very difficult. In addition, e-mails were being lost, approvals were being skipped, revisions were not being maintained, and in the end, HQ was not able to validate if sites rolled out the planogram and if it was done correctly. The entire process was flawed and failing the organization.
Shifting into HighGear
HighGear permitted the customer to build a process that allowed headquarters to trigger the Planogram Process, which maintained the steps to create, manage revisions and sizes and ensure approvals were received for each planogram. The process then pushed the appropriately sized planogram to each site, based on what the site needed, with a specific due date. The Sites would receive their planograms and implement them. As a last step, sites are required to, and cannot complete unless, they take a picture and attach it to their task validating that they completed the setup correctly. Headquarters is then able to validate each site and report data as they need (i.e. who did the request on time, accurately, who was late, etc).
No longer is the process in the heads of employees from random departments. No longer are steps missed in the process. Revisions are maintained, approvals are received, every site is now accounted for and site conformity is now maintained.
In summary, HighGear is able to pull other systems into an easy-to-use centralized system. Users, especially site users, only need to learn one system and everything they need is located in that single system.