Engagement note: Independent analysis carried out with the business. The client, the specific platforms in use and all commercial figures are confidential and are described here in general terms only.
Context
Where the multi-channel analysis looked outward at how sales channels interact, this analysis looked inward at the operation itself: what happens to a book between arriving at the store and reaching a customer.
A small retail operation usually runs on a mix of software and habit. The people doing the work know how it functions, but that knowledge is rarely written down — which makes it hard to say where a system would genuinely help and where it would just add data entry.
Scope of Analysis
- Inventory: receiving, shelving, stock counts and how the recorded quantity drifts from the actual one
- Sales channels: in-store and online sales drawing on the same stock
- Order management: how an order is captured, tracked and closed
- Fulfilment: picking, packing, dispatch and what happens when something cannot be found
Pain points were collected as described by the people doing the work, then examined to separate the complaint from its cause. A complaint about “the system” often turns out to be a process that has no defined owner.
Areas where effort concentrates:
- • Stock accuracy: the recorded quantity and the shelf quantity diverge over time, and the divergence is usually discovered by a customer order rather than by a check.
- • Order visibility: the status of an order lives partly in a system and partly in someone's memory of what they did with it.
- • Fulfilment exceptions: the item that cannot be located takes far more time than a normal order, and the handling varies by who deals with it.
- • Repeated data entry: the same product and order details are re-entered in more than one place, which is both slow and a source of mismatches.
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