In the fall of 2002, Sears noticed that many of its stores were slow to implement merchandising and promotional policies dictated by headquarters. Now, with a new web-based store planner system from Store Perform Technologies Inc., its stores have cut by 10% the time it takes to execute promotions and gained other efficiencies, Sears and StorePerform report.
Sears completed implementation of the StorePerform Workbench store planner system over a corporate intranet in March 2003. After several months of operation, it recently surveyed 1,000 employees who use the system and recorded several areas of improvement in the way stores communicate with headquarters and implement policies. "The Workbench enabled us to throw away paper-based store planners, and made it far easier to distribute policies, monitor compliance and take timely action to address distribution problems throughout the chain," said Michael Buxton, vice president of operations.
In addition to reducing the time it takes to execute store promotions, Sears cites the following improvements:
• store management time on sales floor increased by 2.92 hours/week;
• monthly planning process time reduced by 35 days;
• time to execute store promotions improved by 10.1%;
• time spent reviewing reports was reduced by 1.9 hours/week;
• number of e-mail corrections received by stores decreased by 15.4%;
• time to execute markdowns improved by 7.9%.
Sears also noted that more than 70% of the surveyed Sears employees said they realized:
• increased store compliance rate on field/home office requests;
• significantly reduced time spent identifying issues and increased time spent addressing those issues;
• reduced need to call home office for assistance;
• increased ability to delegate and prioritize tasks;
• increased accountability to the district, store and associate levels.
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