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Operations leaders knew there was an urgent need to rethink the daily floor walk process inside of its thousands of stores across the country, thus giving store leaders a redesigned system through which they would be able to more easily and efficiently identify, manage, and delegate all of the critical, day-to-day tasks required in order to keep their stores running smoothly. Much needed change eventually came via a custom, digital task-management platform that allowed all store leaders and employees to collaborate much more efficiently.
Research
Strategy
Prototyping
Technical Architecture
Product Development
Change Management
We were brought in to help Operations leaders reimagine the daily floor walk process. Essentially, each and every morning, store managers are responsible for walking the floor, looking for things that are out of place. Their goal is to find things that are out of place on the floor…basically critical tasks that need to get done. Those notes were then jotted down in yellow legal pads, via pen and paper, then handed off to department managers who are responsible for delegating that work to their team members.
— Mason McClelland Sr. Product Owner, RevUnit
There was a tremendous desire to completely rethink the floor walk process inside of the stores smaller and supercenter locations, thus giving store management a redesigned system through which they would be able to more easily and efficiently identify, manage, and delegate all of the critical, day-to-day tasks required in order to keep their stores running smoothly. Doing so meant creating a new system that allowed store personnel to co-manage critical store operations and key daily tasks in real-time.
The existing process was inefficient and inconsistent
Store management was reliant upon an antiquated, analog system that actually had become more of a burden than a benefit. They had reason to question both the efficiency and usefulness of the floor walk, a daily ritual for leaders at each location across the country. In effect, store management was stuck between a rock and hard place — the daily floor walk was critical for daily operations, but it also took too much time, created unnecessary back-and-forth communication, and often created more headaches.
Consequently, store leaders often spent an hour each morning walking the store, jotting down notes, typing them up, and then delegating those tasks to department managers. And when hourly team members were finally assigned those tasks, there was no easy way to determine whether or not the task had been completed. What’s more, there was little-to-no uniformity in the process itself, which created a system full of inconsistency and irregularity.
In effect (and largely through no fault of their own), both store leaders and hourly team members were handicapped by both process and tools, and as a result, the primary actors responsible for running day-to-day store operations weren’t working together efficiently.
The existing process was time-intensive and disjointed
We quickly found out the existing process was entirely dependent on a manual, inefficient, and rather tedious daily process. Each morning, store leaders would survey the store floor, looking for things which were either out of place or needed improvement. He or she would make note of these needed changes, and then pass them on to department managers, who would then delegate those tasks to hourly team members. This process was almost entirely paper-based, yet one of the most central to daily store operations.
There were a few, obvious limitations to this approach: First, the system itself lacked both accountability and consistency. That is, store management mostly relied on the “honor system” to determine whether or not these tasks were completed. Second, there were no uniform guidelines which governed how these tasks were documented or shared. This created a great deal of variability and inconsistency between stores (there wasn’t a standardized process that could scale across the brand’s massive footprint). Third, the process itself became a “time suck” for store management often creating gobs of unnecessary back-and-forth communication between various groups.
Many of the leaders making decisions back at headquarters had been former store managers themselves. Thus, there were some inherent biases that weren’t necessarily representative of what was actually happening inside the stores. What’s more, the floor walk process was inconsistent from store to store, so it was difficult to project research or qualitative findings across store locations.
The existing, largely manual process didn’t give store management the type of accountability needed in order to know whether or not critical tasks had been completed. Consequently, the Ops teams back at headquarters also didn’t have access to the type of critical business intelligence that would help them quickly identify inefficiencies across its stores.
Not surprisingly, getting access to store-level and employee-specific data proved difficult. At the time, most of that data was housed on a server inside the store. As a result, connecting to those systems was a significant challenge. Additionally, the sheer volume of available data (thousands of stores across the country) required a database architecture to match the unique, complex needs of such a massive organization.
While the Ops team was the “torch bearer” for the initiative, success was largely dependent upon the ability to work collaboratively with a number of other business units in order to test, build, and deploy a solution that met the incredibly unique needs of such a complex organization. Doing so was not without its own set of challenges.
It was such a close collaboration from the start, because, well, it had to be. The sheer scale of what we were trying to do required that everyone be “all in.” In fact, there was literally a period of time where our two teams were working shoulder to shoulder each day. We worked together and learned together for nearly four years.
— Doug Mitchell, Director, Product, RevUnit
→ Participated in countless store visits across the Midwest over the course of several weeks, including interviews with both store and regional managers across the country in order to better understand their roles, responsibilities, and workflows related to the floor walk process
→ Created a prototype that could be used to test initial hypotheses, elicit additional user feedback, and drive more meaningful conversations between the various internal teams; the prototype formed the foundations of our MVP build.
→ Worked with various internal teams to create a standardized design system, identify requirements for MVP, and performed a multi-week technical feasibility assessment that was then used to inform data and technical architecture decisions for MVP
→ Outlined all requirements necessary to build MVP, identifying critical dependencies, technical requirements, architectural considerations, and potential blockers along the way
→ Worked in two-week sprints, working collaboratively with a variety of teams to determine priorities, remove blockers, and show quick progress (continuous release cycles)
→ Deployed critical functionality often, soliciting feedback from store management that was then used to validate or invalidate core features and functionality prior to system-wide rollout.
→ Tested all critical components prior to launch, worked predominantly with internal tech and systems teams, respectively, to plan and execute a nation-wide platform launch
→ Documented all critical platform components, including business requirements, technical architecture, and system components; provided end-to-end documentation for seamless ownership transition
→ Held multiple training sessions with internal teams to review critical systems, operational processes, and best practices for platform management; these sessions included critical technical support that enabled internal staff to more efficiently expand the platform in the future
→ Led ongoing training sessions to answer questions, provide guidance, and collect critical feedback from client stakeholders and associates; these sessions (including the resulting feedback) were then used in future platform enhancements to improve technical architecture and feature development.
Together, we transformed the in-store task management process into one of real-time collaboration, allowing all store teams to work more efficiently together. The end result was a dynamic, centralized digital platform that replaced the antiquated pen and paper methods that store managers had come to rely upon in order to keep track of daily, in-store activities.
We first designed and built the extensive data infrastructure which was needed to house, secure, retrieve, and surface massive volumes of data in real-time. Moreover, the newly-built technical infrastructure allowed other critical systems to more easily and securely consume critical store-level data, providing a next-level business intelligence capability that was previously inaccessible due to system constraints. As a part of this process, we jointly designed a set of data governance practices and policies which were then implemented so as to create standards for how store-level data was to be utilized by all of the various systems involved.
The underlying technical infrastructure gave store leaders the ability to create and assign tasks to other team members in real-time; it gave all staff a clear, accurate, and up-to-date view of exactly which tasks needed to be completed in order to keep the store running efficiently throughout the day. Most importantly, it made the assignment and completion of those tasks much simpler, effectively creating an activity trail which was both documented and trackable at the store level. Lastly, for the first time ever, it gave team members the ability to provide constructive feedback about the application directly within the platform itself, a feature that’s now a requirement for all internal applications.
Very awesome tool!!!!!! It certainly simplifies the direction given and makes it very easy to walk the store and follow up and check the notes off as complete.
— Store Manager
Allowed team members to create and assign store-level tasks in real time
Created a store-level view of incomplete tasks, providing visibility to all staff
Gave regional managers the ability to take notes and share those with staff
Notified team members when high-priority tasks had been both completed and verified
Allowed for creation and assignment of ongoing, repeatable tasks in an efficient manner
Visualized task performance trends on an ongoing, daily basis for next-level reporting
Jointly created a set of data governance practices to manage store-level data usage
Created shared accountability to routine tasks critical to normal store operations
The average time between task creation and task completion is less than one hour. What’s more, the platform has democratized task management at the store level, reducing the amount of time that store managers spend creating, assigning, and ensuring completion of key operational activities. In fact, the new platform saves management a minimum of an hour of time per day, each day.
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