Process management: the best bet for retail

The retail industry is competitive and dynamic, demanding excellence in the activities performed. Besides, it is marked by many activities and the involvement of several people in each action. Thus, process management in retail is fundamental for success and can be your greatest ally.

Process management is already used by companies from the most varied segments and has proven to be essential for gaining time, agility, efficiency, and security. In this article, we show how retail is no exception to the rule and also has much to gain from process management.

What is process management?

Managers and leaders know how managing businesses is a complex task, regardless of the size of the company. With a universe of details and decisions to be made, missing something (however small) can be decisive to compromise the results. To solve this problem, process management emerged.

Process management is all about identifying, controlling, monitoring and systematizing all tasks and decision making in the day to day of a company, in a totally didactic way, supplying the main difficulties of organization and management. With it, it is possible to visualize all processes, from start to finish, in addition to uniting tasks from all sectors of the company such as HR, administration, marketing, management, and production.

This methodology is called BPM by many, an acronym for Business Process Management. Its main focus is to seek continuous improvement of business processes.

Understanding in practice

Let’s say the company HR wants to request a hiring approval. Instead of going to the manager and asking for authorization, the request can be made from anywhere, even from home. The request will follow the predefined flow, with all the documents from the first step attached, and go through the hiring approver. It will be the approver who will allow or not the hiring, and HR will receive the final feedback on the decision.

Another example of the use of process management in retail is the receipt of goods, an extremely important activity for the sector. The lack of verification generates financial losses, stockouts, etc. With BPM, registering the receipt of goods is a practical task, in which the steps are standardized, ensuring that no product is left unregistered.

The logistics of purchasing and transferring products or equipment are also made easier with process management in retail. A request is made quickly, without numerous informal phone calls or difficulties.

This is all done simply, quickly, and with little bureaucracy, and all decisions are documented and secured. Ten years from now you will be able to go back through that process and know where, why, and by whom an activity was carried out, without missing any details.

Why should I use process management in retail?

Now that you know what process management is, you will get to know why you should use it in your retail enterprise.

Agility

Process management in retail (and in any other segment) stands out for saving time and streamlining daily activities performed by the company. For the retail sector this is even more important, because small activities are repeated several times, such as sales, purchase requests, exchanges, payments, among others.

With this, it is perfectly possible to identify redundancies, unnecessary steps, and performance losses. Furthermore, the processes are simplified, streamlined, standardized, and documented, drastically reducing the time spent on decision making, something very important in a universe where time is the most expensive commodity on the market.

Discussion control

Retailers are often faced with discussions, such as “Who made this decision?”, “Why?”, “When?”, “I didn’t say that”, and an endless list of task imprecision. With the process manager all these uncertainties will be cleared up. This is due to the fact that every aspect of a decision is documented, specified, and traceable at any time and step. Through this, long and tedious discussions are avoided, as well as their costly waste of time.

Task control

All system users will be able to see pending and completed tasks, as well as their timeline. As a result, employees remain aligned with their roles, and communication and collaboration are facilitated.

In addition, process management in retail allows the manager to project and track the productivity of processes and employees. This way, errors can be avoided in advance, which is fundamental for the prospecting of any company.

Security

It is no news that strategic decision making is part of everyday life in the corporate universe. Executives and leaders need to choose the best path for the organization to follow. For the choices not to be mistaken, besides planning, it is necessary to think in a strategic, structured, and supervised way.

Process management in retail, through BPM, works as a “fault radar”, since all decisions will be perfectly architected, helping your enterprise to reach the highest peak of success and ensuring that no decision will go unnoticed, causing undoubted damage.

All the information, negotiations, and tasks can be consulted at any time, generating conciseness in the processes that are carried out. This assures the managers that their company will always remain secure and free of inconsistencies.

Conclusion

Technology is advancing and changing the way we do tasks, as well as changing our perspective on the world, and the retail business is no different. Installing a powerful technology such as process management is essential to follow a successful path and stay competitive by directing and filtering your efforts, a fundamental discipline in an age when everything is about time and paperwork.

Now that you know about retail process management and some of its benefits, do you feel like applying it to your retail business and boosting your results? Fusion Platform offers a BPM tool that will ensure a great experience with your processes. So don’t waste any time and try it out right now!