Before Tom Collins took on a new mobile store-operations app, he was extremely hesitant about letting store managers execute certain mission-critical jobs.
“They’d tell me, ‘We can do that,’ and I’d say, ‘No, I have to make sure this gets done,’ ” says Collins, who oversees six c-stores within the Franklin, Tenn.-based Home Depot chain.
Today, that’s a different story. With a new app that allows managers to verify completed tasks by taking photos with mobile phones, Collins can rest assured tasks are executed to his standards.
“We’re becoming millennials,” he says. “We’re using technology to save time, move away from paper and become more efficient.”
Efficiency was a primary driver of automation for Heather Heller, regional operations director for Circle K’s Arizona business unit in Phoenix. Prior to incorporating a mobile operational solution, her team of 16 market managers would work off Excel spreadsheets. They’d go to 10 to 12 stores, check off lists, go home to update their computers and then send the information to their solutions provider. That effort has gone away. And now four separate departments—procurement, operations, facility maintenance and marketing—have access to a common database.
Heller’s colleague, Terry Brown, advertising and brand manager for Circle K, is excited about the technology’s potential. “Our users have all levels of familiarity with technology, so we want to get to where they have confidence that the information is getting loaded and sent,” Brown says.
“But [the app] is user-friendly,” Heller says. “So we’ll get there.”
Part of the magic comes from the ubiquity of cellphones, and also participation. The more managers engage solutions, the more updated and accurate the information is, especially with items such as promotion rollouts, audits and employee performance.
What people are ultimately building is a shared database, updated as authorized individuals enter data in a uniform, consistent way, says Nancy Carter, product manager for AccuStore, Clearwater, Fla. Today, many retailers manage their stores with emails, paperwork and spreadsheets that may exist in silos, not filtering into a common database for everyone to review.
Common databases allow for “more visibility, so there’s less searching of emails to see if the right people were included in a discussion, or if a splintering happened and not everyone is still on the conversation,” Carter says.
The process of creating a shared database starts with an initial site survey of every store, Carter says. Retailers realize the value almost immediately, with multiple departments seeing the advantage of compiling and sharing those details.
In one customer’s case, the marketing department saved money by learning the square footage of all its stores. The department had been mailing every store small, medium and large banners; after the initial site survey, it sent only the size that a particular store could accommodate.
The efficiency of a common database eliminates islands of information, such as individual spreadsheets, Carter says: “Spreadsheets aren’t the right place for data maintenance. If you do it in a system that’s shared, it’s real time; you don’t have to worry about the discipline of making the changes, so you’re not bound to Joe’s spreadsheet.”
Such a process change can create uneasiness, Carter admits, because certain people within a company have taken “ownership” of data and its accuracy. But with many solutions, “any user group can own any piece of data and can say either I don’t want anyone changing it but me or someone like me, or be able to approve changes before they become official,” she says.
Automating Processes
Automation can create changes at the store level beyond operations, with benefits spilling into shrink reduction and cashier performance, says Jeffrey Bogatin, CEO of SmartStore, which has offices in Phoenix and New York.
For instance, solutions can identify cashiers who consistently underperform in ringing up particular market baskets, Bogatin says. In his example, 50% of people buy a doughnut with their coffee. Cashiers who consistently ring up coffee customers but not doughnuts (or below 50% of the time) may be targets for additional training.
“The issue is, you’re only as good as your last contact with the customer,” Bogatin says. This way of using data and automation falls in line with what Bogatin believes every solution should be: simple. “All the sophisticated technology in the world is useless unless it’s actionable at the store level,” he says.
Automation can improve efficiencies by reducing or eliminating manual steps, says Austin Skaggs, vice president of marketing for PDI, Temple, Texas. PDI’s labor-scheduling solution, which integrates with its enterprise software, uses a drag-and-drop interface to create and update employee schedules with the move of a mouse.
“The reality is many retailers handle scheduling on paper, on a grid that’s hung on the wall next to the manager’s office,” Skaggs says. “This automated solution gives managers the ability to organize the information in a color-coded, user-friendly landscape and ultimately creates more accurate schedules based on historical time frames, sales data and [employee] availability.”
For a solution by Charleston, N.C.-based PeopleMatter, a mobile-based assessment tool helps managers hire people with the right skills and who are a cultural fit. “Our system is helping our convenience store clients find better people who are staying with the organization longer and becoming more engaged employees,” says Nate DaPore, president and CEO of the firm.
Creating Efficiencies
Efficiencies can occur on many levels, some of which can be both mundane and meaningful. Melissa Hadley, director of product management for The Pinnacle Corp., Arlington, Texas, says Pinnacle worked with a retailer to create a more efficient lottery-management solution.
The solution involved a hand-held scanner. Before it was introduced, a manager would print out a worksheet and hand-write the next available ticket number. Then he or she would key the info into the back-office computer, which was tedious and problematic, especially if the numbers were keyed in wrong. The handhelds eliminated that process.
And the hand-held revolution is only going to get hotter, especially as people tap into the capability of their cellphones and tablets. Vladik Rikhter, CEO of San Francisco-based Zenput, a mobile-solutions provider, says the future for mobile is limitless.
“Mobile phones come with a lot of elements you’d need on the job. It’s a barcode scanner, a video camera, it has audio recording, GPS—and it fits into your pocket,” he says. “We’re a mobile-first company, so we’re trying to achieve 98% usage on a mobile device. People can walk into the store environment without a clipboard or laptop, answer questions and immediately send in their findings.”
Collins of Home Depot now finds himself imagining new reports that managers can easily execute with their new app. “This is the tip of the iceberg,” he says.
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