Retail

Demanding customers. Low-cost competition. Promotional complexity. Workforce churn. To maintain a competitive advantage, retailers are always looking to improve costs, differentiate the shopping experience, and ensure flawless promotional execution. As a result, most retailers are reviewing their many critical business processes and asking how they can be improved and made to be more efficient, while offering more to the customer. Innovative retailers have even appointed Chief Process Officers, to drive towards process excellence.

BPM Opportunity

Retailers are increasingly looking to BPM as a platform capable of meeting their process improvement requirements across a variety of operational areas and are realizing the following benefits:

• Provide a superior customer experience.
  With process coaches, you can adopt best practices and enable employees to deliver a consistent and positive experience for your customers.


• Gain real-time visibility and control over processes.
  Process performance can be viewed by managers in real-time to reduce bottlenecks and improve productivity.


• Ensure data quality and integrity.
  Process models that actually run the process provide consistency and adherence to retailer's business requirements.


• Enable collaboration across your supply chain.
  Automatic notifications and work routing across departments, regional stores, and suppliers reduces time, errors and the manual handling of process exceptions.


• Extend the value of existing applications.
  Leverage existing applications like ERP and SCM by filling in the gaps created through more efficient Web-based forms, interfaces and reporting.


• Respond to change faster.
  Revise processes to respond to competitive demands quickly and with minimal impact on the business.

Lombardi In Action

To reduce cost and improve morale, a fast-growing grocer retailer decided to improve the efficiency of their human resources processes including on boarding new hires, arranging pay and work status changes, and approving vacation and leave requests. Although a central Human Resources system contains key data, the many processes were handled manually through e-mail, faxes, phone calls, and spreadsheets. The grocer implemented Lombardi to handle these processes at the store level with Web forms, without having to submit requests to headquarters for processing. The new process was rolled out in 90 days, and led to the elimination of significant work, improved speed and accuracy and for the first time, and visibility into how the process was working.