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In its Retail Trends for 2025 report, Deloitte outlines the need to“ unleash breakthrough efficiency” as one of six key areas that retailers must consider for 2025, citing strategic cost management, margin improvement and working capital optimization as the three criteria to address in this goal towards creating a more efficient business.
Interestingly, whenever the conversation of retail efficiency begins, many immediately draw their attention to back-end operations: inventory and order management, warehouse processes, and wider supply chain activity. This is not necessarily a wrong assumption to make; an efficient foundation creates a stable and sustainable organization. However, a retailer is only as successful as its sales floor. Any brand could have a well-oiled machine that keeps costs low and optimizes margins with effective pricing and promotions, yet it means nothing if a chaotic, poorly equipped and out-of-sync shop floor cannot generate and maintain sales opportunities.
Retailers cannot afford to forget about the shop floor when it comes to creating efficient practices.
Syncing information
One of the most important aspects of an efficient shop floor operation lies in the retailer’ s ability to sync back-end data with front-end technologies. In the world of order management systems, Customer Relationship Management systems( CRMs) and even accurate inventory tracking practices, in-store associates should be able to access all this information, in real-time. However, this is not always the case.
With many systems working in siloes, data can quickly become skewed. While all technologies in isolation might be working effectively, if they are not communicating with each other consistently, they are not having an optimum impact. Ultimately, this causes performance- and efficiency- to suffer. This is especially true of the shop floor, where, as a result, an associate might have outdated information that is being passed along to the customer. Suddenly, the promise of purchasing the perfect pair of shoes, in the right size and color, is taken away from the store visitor because the product they were told was in stock, is now unavailable. Not only has the retailer lost a sales opportunity, but it has put a bad taste in the customer’ s mouth and risks future sales opportunities.
An efficient shop floor includes an all-encompassing approach to retail technology deployment. CRMs, order and inventory management systems, analytics platforms and point of sale technologies are all linked, and they all communicate seamlessly in realtime.
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