People, Process and Technology

Today’s retail environment is tough. Shrinking budgets, layoffs, consolidation and demanding construction schedules mean that you have to do more with less time, less money, and less staff. To get stores designed, built, renovated and maintained on time and within budget, it is highly critical to work smarter than your competitors and stay connected with the three core elements of effective retailing – People, Process & Technology.

If you have found yourself in a situation where the process seems to change, accountabilities are uncertain and deadlines are missing, then perhaps you have a people, process and technology problem. Getting all the three aligned is absolutely essential to ensure that a process change will work.

And they have to be resolved in that order.

1. People – What are the key issues: who owns the process, who is involved, what are their roles, are they committed to improving it and working together and, most importantly, are they prepared to do the work to fix the problem. It is important to stay connected with retail professionals in the industry to maintain a good talent rate. The industry needs to focus on maturity of their human practices, guide a programme of continuous human resource management, focus on improving individual and team capabilities, integrate people process improvement with business process improvement, establish a culture of performance and professional excellence and align human resource strategies with business goals. Also, we have ignored the knowledge creation or research aspect of our educational system for too long. Creating a culture of research and innovation requires a significant commitment and a long-term view from all stakeholders. This is a fantastic example of an industry-academia linkage necessary to create the next generation of knowledge workers. This global initiative will certainly provide a path to success for companies worldwide through new business initiatives related to performance excellence.

2. Process – A process can be defined as starting with a trigger event that creates a chain of actions that results in something being prepared for a customer of that process. Starting at a high level and identifying the key big steps is important to see the process from end to end. Then moving into more detail to capture the various layers involved and various exceptions. Focussing on the high frequency transactions (Pareto principle) can have significant benefits to standardizing the process. But also remember that it can be the non-standard transactions where service is slipping most, or the chance for significant failure in the process may exist.

3. Technology – Now that people are aligned, and the processes developed are clarified, technology can be applied to ensure consistency in application of the process and to provide the thin guiding rails to keep the process on track – to make it easier to follow the process than not do so. Of course, there is much more to getting a technology project right, but get the above three sorted out and you will be on your way to achieving business success. Great retail technologies and business solutions are much more than clever applications. These end-to-end integrated business applications provide retail businesses around the world with the extra edge over its competitors. It is about blending the right software with experienced people that understand retail and can offer a great service before, during and after implementation. But most of all it is about you, your business and putting your vision of what you want to achieve into practice.

While we accept that most of today’s retail businesses are talent driven and that people are our biggest assets, historically, (at least with IT) organizations have focussed more on proactively improving their delivery processes and their investments in technology.In fact, the current global hue and cry on talent shortfalls and high attrition rates in the retail industry are only the tip of the iceberg. At the business level, there are imperatives like improving productivity, moving up the value chain, enhancing competitiveness and getting closer to the customers. At the organization level, issues like managing a multi-cultural and multi-geographical workforce, managing rapid growth and creating “cool” work cultures continue to take a large mindshare of business leaders and HR professionals. All this while, today’s professional is trying to get multi-skilled and chart a clear career path for himself/ herself.So, it is not good enough to win the “talent wars”. It is also not enough to try solutions (like Business Process Reengineering, Employee Stock Options, Assessment Centres and 360-degree appraisals) in a piecemeal manner. Instead, the need of the hour is to take a holistic view of the organization’s business, culture, technology and talent needs. And adapt solutions based on an integrated and proactive approach towards developing & engaging talent, growing the business and delighting the customers and all stakeholders of the organization.

The strategic objectives of the industry should include:
· Improve the capability of the organizations by increasing the capability of the workforce
· Ensure that process capability is an attribute of the organization rather than of a few individuals
· Align the motivation of individuals with that of the organization
· Retain human assets (i.e. people with critical knowledge and skills) within the organization
By aligning the above core elements, organizations will get enabled to gain insight into its capability for managing and developing its workforce. Retail organizations need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their current human resource management practices in order to understand what steps should be taken to improve them. The organization can then relate its strengths and weaknesses of its practices with the best practices indicated in the model, which helps the organization to prioritize its improvement actions and focus on changes that are most beneficial in the near term while having a roadmap for the long-term objective.