Retail / Consulting

We deliver strategies to stay ahead of the competition in an increasingly changing and competitive marketplace.

Measurable and sustained success

Our team combines proven industrial engineering techniques with deep industry expertise to help your business achieve measurable and sustained success.

We’ll work with you to:

  • Create an efficient, safe and consistent operating environment
  • Increase top-line sales and customer loyalty
  • Make the right decisions to optimize go-to-market strategy
  • Reduce inventory carrying costs and loss due to shrink
  • Improve employee satisfaction and retention

Rapid opportunity assessment

Advancing technology, rising costs and competition over talent make retail a difficult ocean to navigate. We help you baseline current state and develop an opportunity roadmap to improve your bottom line. We design our assessments to focus on core areas that impact operations and productivity, including:

  • Current Labor Planning Approach
  • Utilization
  • Work Methods and Standard Operating Procedures
  • Performance
  • Management Effectiveness
  • Omnichannel & eCommerce Fulfillment

5S workplace optimization

Success starts with optimizing the workplace. It sets the foundation for creating a consistent operating environment which improves work method efficiency, promotes better customer service, and reduces liability. Our team applies industrial engineering workplace design principals and creates a rollout strategy that is right for your business—complete with training and change management support.

We also facilitate program sustainment and continuous improvement by automating ongoing compliance monitoring via workplace reviews that can be conducted on any mobile device. This reinforces employee behavior while flagging exceptions that need manager attention.

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Efficient work methods and industry best practices

We bring modern industrial engineering techniques and cutting-edge industry knowledge to improve every aspect of store operations, from work methods to performance management. We work with you to target the most impactful areas for your business and provide expertise for analysis, training, change management, pilot and rollout strategy. The result is a more optimized, consistent operating environment.

Engineered labor standards

  • Developing engineered labor standards. We combine proven work measurement with innovative analysis tools to create labor standards that drive budgeting, scheduling, business analysis and performance management. Our library of industry typical retail standards is easily customizable to your operations and tailored using store-specific characteristics.
  • Validating your existing labor model. Operating conditions are continuously changing. We’ll ensure you’re allocating the right time to run your business and service customers.
  • Cost-to-serve analysis. Understanding cost-to-serve at an item level is an essential component in optimizing margins across your product mix. We analyze the item-level labor cost of your products to improve resource allocation and target low-efficiency processes. Improve margins and increase sales of more profitable items.

Customer experience

Customer experience has never been more important than in today’s retail landscape. It drives customer loyalty, conversion, basket size, and boosts top-line sales. Yet, understanding what factors drive customer behavior can be challenging. We take an engineered approach to building a complete story of your customers’ in-store experience to build a customer-focused model that’s right for your brand.  This includes elements such as:

  • Customer greeting and engagement
  • Speed of checkout
  • Department queuing
  • Associate adherence to selling model
  • On-shelf availability
  • Store recovery and cleanliness
  • Merchandising execution
  • Customer conversion metrics

Frictionless retail queuing

Queuing is an essential process for most retailers. Queues can form in many parts of the operation and are impacted by a variety of considerations: labor deployment strategy, operational effectiveness, demand forecasting and more.

Our team explores the key factors that determine the success or failure of your customers’ queuing experience. We assess your current state and work to:

  • Understand where, when and why queues form
  • Analyze ideal configurations to maximize throughput
  • Drive best practice for your stores, associates and managers
  • Evaluate performance and efficiency of store teams, along with metrics
  • Examine queue psychology, exploring how your customers feel and behave when in line

Virtual labor department services

After retailers implement new practices, strategies and solutions around managing labor, they often wonder how to maintain and get the most from their investment. Our team can help. We are industrial engineering experts and retail professionals with decades of experience managing corporate labor programs. Not only can we maintain your solutions; we also leverage our experience to provide unparalleled insights and recommendations on how to manage and improve performance. We ensure you are getting the most benefit from your labor management program without the need to take on permanent overhead.

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