Articles by Dan Bursik

The cost of creating and maintaining detailed engineered standards need not be a barrier for game-changing labor improvements. With the right system and approach, retailers of all sizes can leverage less detailed incremental standards to achieve significant benefits with modest resources.

We complete our specialty retail blog series by reiterating its most important points. Special retailers have unique challenges, but they can benefit from a full store planning approach via the right mentality, tools and partnership.

Until recently, job-based scheduling was normal in specialty retail. However, Dr. Zeynep Ton of MIT delineates this practice leads to the vicious instead of virtuous retail cycle. To become virtuous, Ton recommends task-based planning; we agree.

Specialty retailers contend with hidden traffic making it difficult to measure workload. Three options come to mind to overcome this struggle. Specialty operators must measure the data accurately to optimize the store planning continuum.

Part two in our specialty retail series outlines how workload planning for specialty retailers is confounded by hidden traffic. Due to lower conversion rates, retailers have significant difficulty forecasting at accurate levels. With this in mind, understanding the conversion issue may lead to solving it.

A gap exists between what specialty retailers need and technology vendors offer. In a five-part blog series, we investigate four specific underlying issues and offer insight into solutions for specialty retail operators.