Surviving the down

Spent the evening at our flagship store yesterday (Saturday).  I do this frequently as it helps me to be in touch with our customers. Yesterday was a slow day, the lines at the tills were missing which is normally the case on weekends. The store manager attributed it to the mid week in the month which is normally a slow week. We had a good first week with a good weekend number. I guess we are lucky to have our core categories as food and grocery where the sales have not yet dropped drastically. People still have to eat, I guess ;) . Sales at lifestyle stores in India are reported to be down by 20-30%.

So the theme for the coming week in my cost optimization plan is ... designing and implementing a efficient flowthru inventory distribution at our stores. Currently we indent stock from the stores to the distribution center and then replenish using weekly delivery windows. The idea now is to eliminate the flab from the DC on stock. I have been part of similar projects in the past with international retailers but this would be my first Indian experience. We have a excellent business team which makes my life simpler. Since the process maturity in retail is still in the infant stage, there are very few business leaders in the merchandising area who are aware of the best pratices in such processes. By enabling Flow-thru also known as cross docking we plan to shave off a substiantial part of the inventory pile in our DC. 

Lest see how this goes ... .  will post the updates ..