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You can elevate your organization’s capacity to serve customers in an omnichannel fashion through a few select initiatives. We will tell you some of the most common ones so you can cherry pick what is most applicable to you.

These initiatives strengthen your foundation for a core omnichannel retail experience and, in addition, fit the mold of productivity initiatives to help you enhance your customer’s experience.

In today’s environment, retailers are seeking ways to drive bottom-line improvements while positioning for market share gains. With the holiday season – and increased omnichannel orders – coming up, here are some ways to position yourself for growth and drive bottom-line improvements.

1. Improve forecasting and integrated business planning (IBP)

When Target and Amazon – which have strong demand signals given their scale – announce they are overstocked on products this year, it may indicate an opportunity to re-evaluate your own demand planning. Supply and demand imbalances and volatility over the last two-plus years mean that accurate planning has become difficult when relying on historical sales.

Demand planning and inventory management, though, are the bedrock of any retail offering.

Retailers cannot serve customers without product on their shelves or in the warehouses. So, how can you begin improving this key function?

The answer often involves multiple solutions and depends on the purchasing lead time for your business. However, some solutions may lead you to:

• Re-evaluate internal processes – like Levi’s – to have more frequent forecasting or planning discussions across the company. This allows you to react to real-time data given the supply and demand volatility.
• Compare historical forecasts with actualized data to identify the forecasting error rate and pinpoint errors in assumptions that can then be used to enhance your systems.
• Shorten lead times in the supply chain to better respond to demand signals through new vendor partnerships, more favorable purchasing agreements, or flexibility in reallocating inventory.
• Analyze in-stock rates and sell-through by category, vendor or down to the SKU level to pinpoint where the biggest discrepancies may be occurring and how to correct them going forward.
• Shorten lead times in the supply chain to better respond to demand signals through new vendor partnerships, more favorable purchasing agreements, or flexibility in reallocating inventory.
• Analyze in-stock rates and sell-through by category, vendor or down to the SKU level to pinpoint where the biggest discrepancies may be occurring and how to correct them going forward.

Many potential opportunities exist to meet this initiative. The key is to identify current pain points and then look at ways to drive productivity in your business.

Improved planning often leads to fewer markdowns, leaner balance sheets and, ideally, better inventory positions to meet customer demand and drive sales.

2. Evaluate your cost to serve customers in a digital fashion

Your numbers – like most retailers – show that customers who shop in an omnichannel fashion are your best customers. They shop more frequently and spend more with you.

However, do you know how much it costs to serve them via each of your service options?

Many retailers do not have a baseline estimate on the costs to serve customers in each of their service options and, therefore, how to continue to drive down costs as business grows.

We often find opportunities to drive down costs per order across picking and delivery by anywhere from $5-$15+/order. This can yield significant savings opportunities and improve your fulfillment metrics for customers.

Depending on your baseline operations, reducing your costs involves some combination of System, Staff or Site improvements, ultimately delivering better outcomes for your organization.

3. Automate time-intensive tasks or end-to-end processes

Areas or processes that can benefit from improved productivity are often marked by high employee dissatisfaction or heavy workload.

You may be saying, “Sure, this makes sense but isn’t this is a very broad generalization?”

It is, but the process to unearth these opportunities is similar and marked by common symptoms:

• Poor customer experience driven by the need to execute internal processes in a certain fashion
• Time-intensive processes that are critical to maintaining the business [example: order picking]
• Employee dissatisfaction marked by high workload or stress from a significant volume of requests from other business teams
• Difficulty executing core projects or work based on a high degree of change or stakeholder management
• Mismatch between allocated resources and output or progress on goals.

If you notice similar pain points in your organization, chances are a focused deep dive will reveal areas of friction that can be removed altogether or solved via automation.

As an example, we recently worked with a client where an internal function was completely overwhelmed by the volume of inbound requests from business teams. The net result was a disjointed process that resulted in a poor customer experience in the store that was reflected in Net Promoter Score (NPS) numbers.

Through automation of requests and process improvements, the client was able to both improve the in-store experience and reduce workload for teams.

Chances are your organization has many of these types of opportunities. Which ones are most pressing that you can tackle in the second half of this year?