Retail SOP

The competition in the branded jewelry segment in India is about to intensify with the Mukesh Ambani owned Reliance Retail Limited (RRL) recently declaring its mega foray into Jewelry Retail by opening 100 exclusive Reliance Jewels outlets across the country in coming three years.
Mukesh Ambani owned Reliance Retail Limited ventured into jems and jewelry trade because of the never ending demand of jewels in India. The first store was launched in Bangalore in early 2009. Sprawled over three storeys and covering an area of 6,000 sq ft, the Reliance Jewels store at Bangalore proffered as many as 10,000 designs of elegantly created jewelry pieces. It is learnt that the jewelry collection here, has been assimilated from different parts of India. The availability of a wide range of gold and diamond jewelry makes Reliance Jewels a one-stop shopping venue for buyers of fine jewelry.
By the end of December 2009, Reliance Group increased the number of store launches for Reliance Jewels to 10. The multi-format retailer now aims to expand by opening jewelry stores in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Dhanbad, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Jalandhar, Jamnagar, Jamshedpur, Jodhpur, Ludhiana, Mumbai, New Delhi and Vizag adhering to core Reliance Jewels strategy of expansion through saturation.
Enthused by good sales in the past few months, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Retail Lifestyle is now planning to increase the number of Reliance Jewels outlets to 100 by 2013. We are upbeat about our same store sales growth. The past eight months have been very good for us… with 22 per cent growth. And I think this is the best time to expand as the rentals have gone down to some extent. In the next 3 years, we will be scaling the Reliance Jewel stores to 100, Reliance Retail Lifestyles CEO Bijou Kurien told PTI.
The company has plans to add 14 more by this fiscal-end to its existing 10 outlets of Reliance Jewels, which sells gold and diamond jewellery under private label RJ. We have announced to open 10 more Reliance Jewels stores and six Time Out store by the end March with a total investment of Rs. 150 crore, Kurien said. The new stores will come up in New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Andhra Pradesh and Mumbai, where it already has its lifestyle outlets. Besides it will also open a few shops in Kochi and Bangalore.
All its outlets of Reliance Jewels are large format stores ranging from 2,500 sq ft to 15,000 sq ft. As per the plan, the gold jewelry at all Reliance Jewels stores will consist of Kolkata Filigree, Rajkot minakari jewelry, Kundan from Jaipur, Temple jewelry from Kerala, Jadau from Amritsar and so on. Even in Diamond jewelry, Reliance will offer only the best. One will find the widest variety of Diamond jewelry designs here ranging from simple daily wear to party wear items to celebrate every special occasion in a persons life.

Interior and exterior commercial retail lighting play an important role in every stores success. Exterior lights help people locate the store at night and assist in branding the establishment.

Interior lights provide general lighting and also bring out the color in merchandise which helps prompt a buying decision. When carefully chosen and properly installed, interior ambient and accent lighting increase the marketability and sales of products.

Because profit margins on all but the most expensive products are often marginal, overhead is the retailers biggest challenge. Always try to combine energy efficiency with superior luminance and lifespan when choosing lights for your retail clients.

Taking the time to comprehensively develop a multi-layered lighting system will both differentiate your clients and your work from that of lesser, competing lighting design firms.

Exterior

Aesthetics plays a critical role in commercial exterior retail lighting. Clients often judge the type of experience they will have inside a store by the appearance of the exterior and landscape.

Quality sign, walls or above entrances lighting is a must for any retail establishment. Goosenecks are excellent fixtures for this effect.

If the store is a standalone, it will need both building lights and canopy lights to properly illuminate its form and entranceways. Fluorescents are usually the fixtures to use for exterior retail lighting due to longer lamp life and high energy efficiency ratings.

Your clients will pay less per month for their use and experience very infrequent maintenance and replacement costs. Parking lot lights can be either general or decorative, depending on the nature of the establishment.

Make certain you meet mandatory foot candle requirements, pay close attention to the contrast of light and shadow that your lighting system establishes. This is a critical factor to safety than foot candle levels, and a very good reason to invest in a professional lighting photometric analysis.

Ambient Interior Lighting

Ambient light is another term for general light. The level of ambient lighting in a store is determined by two things.

First, the physical size will of course play a big role in the overall luminance the overhead lights will be able to shine throughout the building. Extremely large wholesale and grocery stores with high ceilings will need either high bay or low bay lights.

The newer pulse start metal halide lights offer superior energy ratings and make for very good retail lights in these environments. For retailers on a budget, or for ceilings under 25 feet in height, fluorescent low bay lights can be used instead.

Department stores, clothing stores, and smaller food stores can also be lit very effectively with parabolic troffer fluorescent lights. Retail discounts stores can use a series of parabolic fluorescents for general overhead lighting, and then selectively employ accent lights to draw attention to items on sale or special interest.

Accent Interior Lighting

Accent lighting sets a special product or group of products apart from the rest of the merchandise. Because of this, accent retail lighting plays an important role in the success of almost every retail establishment, regardless of size or product type.

Of course, its most important role is in high end retail lighting. Accent lighting helps differentiate unique qualities of products on display that require special attention and a sense of being set apart from the surrounding environment.

The lower the ambient lighting is, the brighter the accent lighting becomes, and the more removed an object appears from general reality. Jewelers and designer clothing retailers use this form of extreme contrasts between ambient and accent lighting to give a surreal appearance to merchandise.

A wide variety of recessed lights are often utilized for retail accent lighting. Adjustable fixtures are better because they allow managers to periodically change displays and readjust the lights to compliment the new setting.

Pendants are also very good retail lights to use over any display that is fixed in a central position within a store.

Designer Interior Lighting

Special display lights are often required in custom shelving and display cases. Linear strip lights for retail lighting are superb for jewelry, accessories, and specialty item displays. They can be mounted to the interiors of specialty display cases, or they can be mounted to the undersurfaces of shelves.

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) has been considered a best practice in the manufacturing industry for the past 25 years. Initially started as a process to balance demand and supply, retail S&OP has evolved to a more robust Integrated Business Planning (IBP) process that links Strategic Plans, with product portfolio reviews and new product introductions, unconstrained demand plans, supply plans and capabilities, and financial appraisals of the Integrated Business Plans over a planning horizon of 24 months or more.

Significant benefits, both financial and strategic, have been the result of S&OP implementations in the manufacturing sector. However, in the retail sector, S&OP has not been adopted or at least not adopted in what would be defined as Class A Best Practices. This is currently causing the Retail Supply Chain network to remain unpredictable, minimizing some of the benefits a retail supplier would see from S&OP as well as the benefits a retailer would see if it adopted retail S&OP Class A Best Practices.

This article on Retail S&OP will describe recent developments with retail’s migration towards integrated business planning implementations. In detail, we will discuss:

1) Why Retail S&OP?

2) What is Retail S&OP (in detail)?

3) The impact of Retail S&OP on the retailer and the retailer’s suppliers.

The Role of Effective Integrated Business Planning and Communication

Retail S&OP is a step-by-step process that includes monthly reviews, product reviews, and category management. Before it was introduced, however, plans were always kept on the short term horizon, a nightmare for effective planning initiatives. Today, VICS, or Voluntary Inter-industry Commerce Solutions, is a standards body that almost every major corporation, such as Walmart, Lowe’s, and Target, abides by. Before VICS introduced these best practice measures, suppliers were pushed to implement integrated business planning in some form or another into their existing processes – whether they worked or not – in order to reduce costs and encourage in-house efficiency. Essentially, it was to keep up with the competition.

Reciprocation and trust remain vital in keeping the supply chain strong, but these elements have to trickle down to every stepping stone for integrated business planning to work. With VICS heading up retail S&OP initiatives, the process established a more direct approach to integrated business planning, at least two years out, that involved all partners and links in the chain. Information was shared to promote reciprocation. With a more proactive sharing strategy in place, companies using retail S&OP are often more adept at balancing and forecasting supply and demand and product launches, making the entire retail supply chain significantly less reactive and, thereby, saving money for everyone involved.

The product itself benefits from better integrated business planning strategies. In order to decide which new product will in fact be launched or promoted, the merchandising group draws up a monthly review to chart out a course of action. But planning doesn’t stop at the monthly level since many buyers plan well in advance of a year. Clothing purchases can occur eighteen months out; stores change layouts; aisles get wider; and promotional activities are scheduled — this all takes months and manpower to plan. However, if this information is shared in advance, suppliers can plan appropriately.

Some of this shared information comes from various sources, such as the store replenishment group, who indentifies in-store demand. Point of Sale (POS) is another useful retail tool that can scan and record purchases and, therefore, help forecast demand. It’s the responsibility of the warehouse management and logistic transportation group to collaborate to figure out lead time as well as how much inventory should be kept in stock. Routine supply review aggregates this detailed information to ensure there is enough product in the right place at the right time. And, as would be expected, there are significant cost improvements here. Retail S&OP helps avoid supply chain disasters, while keeping necessary merchandise in stock. Too much stock on hand equates to money sitting in limbo, while an extended shelf life requires products to be returned to the manufacturer or, worse, become dated.

The Future of Integrated Business Planning in the Retail Industry

Issues are bound to arise, but any problems should be resolved at the lowest level before being escalated. Potential concerns may center on building new distribution centers, declines in demand, or poor promotions. If questions remain, any financial appraisals can be done by the CFO or executive team, based, of course, on monthly reviews that forecast profit.

Company executives will be looking at the business over the next twenty four months, primarily at the aggregate level, to make sure that the company is going in the right direction. During each strategic meeting, executives will expect retail S&OP to work in this capacity, while hoping to avoid the Bull Whip effect. (In a nutshell, this means if you were to break out the different links in the supply chain and look at each individual product, it would be fairly predictable. If you were to go to different links of supply chain and look at orders between each link, such as supplier to store, the image starts to look like a bull whip, vacillating and unsteady. However, the farther one gets away from the retail store link, the more the bull whip fluctuates up and down.)

You may be wondering what’s next for integrated business planning in retail. Above all, collaboration is the key to success. CPFR(R)(1), or Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment, an industry standard of VICS, helps steady the Bull Whip, eliminating many of the emergencies or issues. Integrated business planning also ensures that fires are extinguished at the source. Just remember that the biggest sin in retail is to disappoint customers with ‘out of stock’ notices – largely preventable with a methodical approach to retail S&OP.

References

1. CPFR(R) is a Registered Trademark of the Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Standards (VICS) Association.

In a 2001 report published by Celent, a firm that is concentrated on the implementation of information technology in the world pecuniary assistance sector, it showed that retail brokerage in North America may be down but definitely not pass.

The said company has two primary offerings namely research and consulting. Research takes place when then provide their clients with constant dose of information while consulting is when they work hand- in- hand with their clients on particular pressing issues. Established in 1999 by senior financial analysts, Celent is an autonomous and profitable corporation that is dedicated into supplying objective data as well as beneficial advice.

Retail brokerage was described like agonizing with a ferocious mammal market who keeps on shunning them away from potential opportunities. The sad thing was, the pain was not equally distributed. Not all of the agents were one with the sentiment because others were still enjoying the fruits of their labors. An analyst, Alenka Grealish, made a comparison on the performance of four types of firms such as full- service, regional full- service, pure- play online establishments and clicks- in- bricks establishments. All of which have a mixture of widespread branch network that bears a very important presence.

It was also looking into the factors that drive retail brokerage into a dramatic inflation in residential equity holdings. The pressing issues were being discussed in relation to the previous behavior of individual investors. The sample model for the full- service type has been suggesting resilience in the trades as it registered the smallest alteration in the pre- taxation profit margins. It began since the downturn and provision of asset diversification matters. In the other hand, the clicks- in- bricks establishments have already ascertained the blend of an extensive section system and a leading virtual existence. It already reached to a margin of nearly 25% which were more pregnable to decreasing trading influx.

Another retail brokerage type, pure- play online establishments were endangered species. Alenka Grealish projected that the virtual connection will unceasingly mushroom that forms a novel niche for contenders in the profession thus, promoting further disintermediation or division of the once frenzied situation. She added that it can supply tools for investors as well as recommendations that will seemingly appear a near- term victory. Between the months of September to October, distinct shareholders did not tender for the egress. There was only a single adjustment in September which presently sits moderately rigid, she stated.

Alenkae Grealish also noted that it was difficult to view through nimbus clouds. She explained that it was like there was recession generating to a fierce war. There were past experiences that showed the enthusiasm was entirely gone. However, she left a challenge rendering that it was the period for building customer loyalty.

Retailing begins with the quest to attract more people to the store. The exterior of the store is the first attraction for the passers-by. A well-decorated store front can make the people stop and at least have a look at the displayed items. For the visual merchandisers, the retail window displays are free advertising spaces. These are the means to urge the people to come inside the store to buy the products or services. So these turn the common people into customers. The designers of these spaces utilize these to the maximum effect by using various methods of display. The techniques of graphic design, different types of illumination, and placement of the product in the retail window displays are key elements of window dressing.

The retail window displays are guided by the store philosophy and profile. Whether the display shall feature expensive or economic products, how frequently the display shall change, and whether the prices shall be displayed on a regular basis are some of the aspects that the visual merchandisers consider while going about their work.

In the exhibitions, where you are provided with a temporary stall and do not have the benefit of a permanent window display space, the visual merchandisers design and decorate the entire stall to make it look appealing for the onlookers. Whether it is the placement of the mannequin, its dressing, the placement of product, the exhibition stand design, the design of chairs and tables, the lighting, the billboards, the posters, and other POP material, these are used judiciously to attract the maximum number of customers.

If there are some events to be held, such as the fashion shows, the music concerts, weddings, etc., the event dressers utilize the space to provide the perfect ambience both for the visitors or guests and the clients using this facility.

The designers and dressers of the retail window displays, events, and exhibitions use the computers to maximum the effect for deciding the right design, layout, and dressing of the spaces. They use several types of software, such as 3D Studio Max, Illustrator and Photoshop, etc., to do the 3D modeling. By using these, they can suggest how the space will come up by using the different mix of design, lighting, POP material, placement, etc. This helps in the proper planning and execution of the project. It is important to save cost, time, and effort in trying out the different options before selecting the right one. The 2D models are used to design the cardboards, billboards, and other 2D displays with which the store or stall front can be decorated.

Whether these are the retail window displays for a store chain in the busy market location or for your store or boutique, having a look at the display techniques and methods of other stores also helps. At first, it helps provide fresh ideas for the visual merchandiser. Second, it helps aid the designing effort by creating something different from the nearby stores.

So all these methods are essentially the ways and means to promote the sales effort of the store, thereby increasing its business.