We were engaged by a well-known high street fashion retailer to map their wholesale & franchise business processes and conduct a software selection.
Challenge
- Our client’s wholesale and franchise channels were growing quickly and the teams were struggling to manage the business
- The business was managed entirely on spreadsheets and our challenge was to streamline their end-to-end business processes, define business requirements and conduct a software selection to recommend systems to support the forecasted growth
Approach
- We first mapped their business processes, from product development and showroom through to distribution and invoicing
- We captured pain points in the processes and opportunities for streamlining the operations
- We defined a set of business requirements and criteria to conduct software selection. We used the requirements and criteria to identify roughly ten systems to assess
- We proposed a few architecture designs based on the systems we evaluated and the company’s IT roadmap
- As the IT roadmap did not allow time to implement a wholesale specific solution, business decided to conduct detailed process review workshops to identify pain points to target
- Based on the output of the workshops, we developed an agile approach to rationalise and simplify the existing spreadsheets
- We embedded a consultant directly among Wholesale teams to allow for close communication and feedback, and develop a deep understanding of employee roles and functions, documents and systems, the underlying processes, and broader insight into relationships inside and outside the organisation
- For processes that were complex, highly variable or across several roles and parties, we would map and analyse the process to understand the degree of business or technical effort required
Outcome
- The initiative ultimately led to significant time savings (over 90 labour hours per week across the Wholesale team)
- By simplifying the spreadsheets, we improved the data accuracy, accessibility and insight,
- We produced higher team productivity and confidence. The changes empowered individuals to think more strategically on their ways of working and how they could contribute
