Many retailers often focus their time and effort on the front end of their brick-and-mortar stores. At physical stores, customers come in and are greeted by friendly faces and a welcoming environment.
But what about the backend? This area of your retail store is where your inventory lies, where products are processed, packed, stored, and shipped out. It’s also where you can assess the health of your cash flow.
The backend retail management process includes the following operations:
- Inventory Management
- Financial Transactions
- Bookkeeping
- Customer Support
- Returns Processing
Backend operations are a critical business area. You can’t expect to run your retail business if these operations are inefficient. If your most popular products are running out of stock, you’ll miss out on sales opportunities. Another example is customers who want to return damaged goods and request a replacement. How do you process their request if you don’t have an established returns policy?
With this in mind, boosting the efficiency of your retail backend operations is a must. This involves investing in technologies that help manage the entire order fulfillment process, like warehouse management software (WMS). You may contact Softeon to learn more about the capabilities of this tool and how it helps your store.
With streamlined operations, you boost customer support, reduce operating costs, and gain a higher market share in the retail industry. Now here’s a list of ways to do so:
1. Assess Existing Backend Retail Operations
Before anything else, reviewing the current processes in your backend retail store is essential. This involves identifying any bottleneck that slows operations and finding ways to address it.
For instance, you might learn that your backend has data- and premise-security vulnerabilities. You might find out that the physical security measures in your retail store’s front and back end are weak, which can make your business a target of burglary. In that case, you might find hiring additional security personnel to protect the goods and the retail premises necessary for resource, employee, and customer safety.
In another case, you might discover you don’t have a strict data-protection protocol for payment transactions. This could expose sensitive information, like customer banking details, to cyber threats. So you might have to consider looking for IT support services in Orange County, for instance, or in other major cities to safeguard customer data.
Regular assessments are generally necessary to keep your business free of operational creases.
2. Reduce Obstructions On Aisles And Interactive Zones
There are instances when accidents occur in the backend retail premise due to obstructions. For example, a shelf stacker tripped on boxes while filling shelves with inventory, which injured the employee or even hospitalized them.
And for a retailer, this problem isn’t limited to reduced productivity because you might also have to pay for costly legal claims. This is especially true if the injured staff won’t be able to work anymore or, worse, die due to that incident.
To reduce on-premise risks, you will have to place preventive measures, such as clearing all obstructions on aisles and interactive zones. This may involve keeping racks, boxes, ladders, and other items away from these areas. In a restaurant, it’s also important for workers to wear non-slip shoes to avoid slip and fall accidents.
Likewise, provide visible lines for paths and indicate whether areas pose a high hazard. Most importantly, attach glow-in-the-dark markings to exits so employees can leave the premises during emergencies.
3. Leverage Inventory Forecasting
As you already know, inventory is vital to your retail business. Failure to manage it may result in excessive stock, often leading to wasted goods. You may also experience out-of-stock incidents when you fail to predict product demand correctly. These are common inventory problems contributing to higher costs and lower profits.
To prevent this issue, you will need to improve the accuracy of your inventory management system. This includes forecasting inventory by reviewing your sales history. It indicates which products are top selling and which have fewer demands and are likely to cause low inventory turnover.
Besides those insights, you might find barcode scanning technology and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags useful in streamlining your inventory and improving forecasting. Barcode scanning allows for efficient tracking of goods at every point in the supply chain. Therefore, you can monitor each product’s movement from production until it reaches the shelves of your retail store.
4. Upgrade POS System
The point-of-sale (POS) system lets you track consumer transactions. However, the sales data from traditional POS systems are only accessible locally. You can’t automatically export and share this information with your business locations. As a result, there’s no central database for all retail operations, and you’ll waste time manually transferring data.
Save yourself the hassle by upgrading to modern POS systems that offer advanced features, such as the following:
- Generating orders when restocking is necessary
- Monitoring customer loyalty programs so you can manage any issue with loyalty points, rewards, and perks
- Organizing employee schedules
- Tracking employee performance with metrics
With these capabilities, an advanced POS system is imperative in boosting the accuracy of your retail operations.
5. Provide Vendors With Tags
Sometimes, vendors must access the backend retail premises for restocking. However, they might unknowingly access restricted areas if you don’t track their movement. This, in turn, might lead to accidents or even security issues like theft.
To prevent these risks, provide each visitor with tags so they can only access the areas they should be in. With tags, you’re capturing records for incident verification since it delivers alerts as they move throughout the premises. If there’s an issue, the system sends you a signal to follow up on any suspicious activity.
6. Automate Attendance Tracking
Absenteeism can be a significant issue for retailers. If most of your staff members tend to call in sick or take leaves without permission from their supervisors, this affects productivity.
As such, automating the process of tracking employee attendance is a must. This includes using two-factor authentication (2FA), enabling workers to use their phones for on-device fingerprinting. Then the supervisors receive notifications when staff is absent or aren’t in their designated zones. This strengthens compliance with retail policies, ensuring employees attend to their tasks.
If a worker is frequently absent, the human resource (HR) managers can handle it with accurate records about the incidents. This creates accountability and helps identify potential issues with workforce management to reduce employee absenteeism.
Summing It Up
Overall, an efficient retail store is reliant on the efficiency of its backend operations. To improve backend efficiency, consider investing in modern technologies, particularly 2FA, barcode scanning, RFID and vendor tags, and a WMS for automating tasks.
Installing state-of-the-art technology can streamline inventory and security management, sales transactions, and even workforce management. Most importantly, it provides a seamless customer experience since you always have enough products in your retail store. This can translate to loyalty and higher sales, ensuring long-term retail success.
