Small and medium businesses (SMBs) continue to be impacted by inflation and the increased cost of living.
With the rising cost of raw materials, rent, utilities, and labour, companies are operating with limited resources and sharp profit margins. This reinforces the need to be on top of the workforce and supply chain costs more than ever.
Traditionally, businesses had separate strategies for each channel, such as physical stores, websites, mobile applications, social media, and call centres. However, with the rise of digital technologies and the increasing customer demand for a unified experience, the concept of an omnichannel strategy has gained prominence. An omnichannel approach aims to provide a seamless and integrated customer experience across multiple channels and touchpoints.
With the right tools in place, SMBs can adopt an omnichannel strategy to simplify tasks and workflows, to create both cost and time efficiencies. Omnichannel strategies are increasingly growing in popularity, with almost 79% of Australian marketing decision-makers in the retail and consumer goods industries looking to implement or further invest in seamless customer experiences. Understanding the need to critically assess the utilisation of assets to adopt an efficient omnichannel strategy, many brick-and-mortar retailers and their supply chain partners are converting facilities, optimising labour, and re-engineering processes to support new omnichannel warehouses, distribution centres (DC), and in-store fulfilment operations.
Helping teams through omnichannel execution strategies
When it comes to omnichannel execution strategies, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. While some retailers are establishing dedicated fulfilment centres, others are just fulfilling out of the same DCs meant for brick-and-mortar stores. Regardless, they all share the same goal of wanting to enhance overall efficiency, fulfilment speeds, and labour cost savings.
The more retailers can streamline communications and automate activities to improve workflow conformity and policy compliance, the more retail associates and managers can focus on higher-value tasks and balance day-to-day activities. Therefore, any retailer wanting to absorb the shock of increased DC workloads and optimise fulfilment operations should focus on incorporating more modern workforce scheduling, task management, and inventory management solutions into their software mix.
These types of prescriptive tools empower and engage employees in a very personal and timely manner based on the current situation – not just forecasted models or historical trends. They can also boost efficiency across a number of administrative and logistical workflows in warehouses and DCs. This helps save a significant amount of money in labour and payroll costs while enabling greater efficiency and accuracy in budgeting and forecasting and improved alignment of hours to sales activity. Managers can also save time by reducing time spent on employee scheduling, which usually needs to be conducted on a weekly basis.
How SMBs can utilise modern workforce scheduling
Today’s consumer commerce models demand a new mix of flexibly available associates in warehouses and DCs, along with improved merchandising, fulfilment, and customer support skills that keep up with agile processes. Traditional workforce scheduling methods, such as email-only employee communication, fall short in this high-speed, data-driven, and ever-changing environment. The same goes for outdated technology tools that limit workers’ access to actionable information about their responsibilities. Such systems lead to overburdened associates and managers, low employee morale, and, in turn, a poor customer experience.
Additionally, DC managers cannot quickly and easily adapt to new program rollouts using legacy technologies – or if they are lacking technology completely. Corporate leaders need visibility into meaningful key performance indicators to make smart labour decisions and proactively monitor output. If productivity declines for any reason, and nothing is done to address it, employee turnover will rise, orders may get delayed, and customers might turn to other businesses.
Fortunately, SMBs can adopt modern workforce scheduling, task management, and inventory management solutions with great speed and efficiency. Once they are live, these applications can facilitate a range of operations. This includes warehouse auditing and compliance, operational checklists and intelligent forms processing, and inventory scanning and routing. They can also be broadly applied for task execution management – both in the warehouse or DC and front of the store, which is favourable for those who value the simplicity of managing a standardised technology architecture across the entire operation.
Cloud-based, mobile-enabled solutions are recommended when looking for the right tools to equip your workforce. Such solutions can be rapidly rolled out and adopted. These technology solutions include software and delivery hardware together and can provide capabilities such as:
- Integration with existing third-party systems: These include equipment maintenance and warehouse and transportation management applications; core transactional systems, such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) backbone; and labour-related systems such as payroll solutions. This will allow you to reach full solution utilisation as quickly as possible, without having to craft your own interfaces or workarounds.
- Real-time communications and notifications: With mobile-delivered alerts and messages, managers and front-line associates can manage by exception, reacting in real time to a fast-developing problem (such as a missing order). They can also execute with agility on new directives and tasks, including recalls, equipment maintenance reminders and alerts from Internet of Things (IoT) technologies (such as sensors)—boosting compliance and reducing the number of open/late tasks.
- Workforce management tools: This allows managers to create accurate labour budgets, forecasts, and schedules anytime, from anywhere. This ensures that the right mix of skilled and trained associates will always be present to support customers and fulfil their orders accurately and on time.
- Employee self-service capabilities: This empowers associates to easily see schedules, swap shifts, request vacation time and more, all from their mobile devices. The solution should also embed corporate rules and route requests to managers for such things as time-off approvals, to ensure the right mix of employees who are up to speed on new processes. This will boost morale and employee engagement, while reducing burnout and turnover.
- Checklist/auditing and documentation functions: These support compliance and enable corporate-regional visibility into front-line activities. Just be sure to give associates mobile access to standard operating procedures, training guides, maintenance request forms, and operational checklists. This will promote safety and security, along with operational excellence.
- Cutting-edge retail inventory management: These enable such things as real-time visibility into assets, people, and processes in each relevant operational area, including the DC. Specific technology platforms to consider include: predictive supply chain analytics as well as mobile computing, scanning, sensing and printing. Just be sure to select solutions with 1D or 2D barcode scanning and RFID read capabilities. These will make employees more efficient in their jobs and keep the DC processes running with optimal efficiency.
Beating the turbulent market conditions
No matter when, why or how retailers decide to modernise their warehousing and DC operations, executing such a significant operational overhaul while adhering to new regulations makes it a challenging activity, especially for front-line associates and managers charged with maintaining business continuity amidst the chaos. But the effort is worth it.
Improving fulfilment efficiency and accuracy without adding more complexity to team workflows can help boost the overall cost savings and productivity of small businesses. Business leaders should evaluate their task, workforce and inventory management software solutions to help achieve this.
By adopting workforce management solutions, managers can push job-related data to employees. To best action this data, employees need to know the best next step to take every second of the day, especially given the fluidity of processes, expectations, and regulations.
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