Providing professional consulting assistance to retailers, distributors, and consumer products clients.

Let us assist your organization with a custom designed benchmarking study and performance diagnostic that will provide your team with specific performance metric information. We can assist you with:

Industry general, industry specific, operating metric, and operational technique assessment and benchmarking studies
Guidance on how best to structure a benchmarking study to optimize the understanding and accuracy of the data requested and collected
Data questionnaire development
Guidance on reconciling benchmarks against internal metrics, key ratios, and KPI’s
Guidance on how to avoid “hidden” benchmarking process challenges
Custom “blind” benchmarking studies targeted against specific retailers who we will approach to solicit their participation
An improved understanding of your true operating ability and the resulting relationship you create with your customers
Benchmarking results interpretation and the development of a comprehensive S.W.O.T analysis
The identification of applicable “best practices” that should be employed to improve your performance
Coordination with balanced scorecard efforts

Global Best Practices and Benchmarking

Our lengthy presence in the retail consulting arena has permitted us to experience thousands of permutations of operating procedures in virtually every format in retail. This operating experience has developed a strong base of retail process understanding and allows us to rapidly identify operating procedure refinements that will generate genuine repetitive savings for our clients.

We work with our clients to initially assess and quantify the improvement potential that exists. We then jointly develop our improvement strategy and lead select departments or locations to higher levels of performance. This approach permits us to not only prove the value of our recommendations for improvement, but also build client team ownership in the new processes. The greater the client ownership the higher the probability that the new processes will be transferred to other locations successfully and will become part of the fiber of the organization.

As our retail consultant team amassed decades of experience, we collected as much pertinent retail performance data and benchmark data as was reasonably possible. Our database of performance benchmark information coupled with publicly available information and custom benchmark performance data surveys permit us to provide an invaluable benchmark perspective to our clients comparing their performance against industry specific performance targets. We often utilize this database as a component of our process improvement effort.

Among the various types of Benchmarking study information, we can assist your firm with: industry general, industry segment specific, operating metrics, and operational technique benchmarks. Any of these perspectives can be utilized to provide valuable insight into performance improvement opportunities and provide guidance in structuring the efficient implementation of an improvement program in conjunction with a chain-wide transfer process.

In order to provide examples of our benchmarking capability and display sample subsets of various types of benchmark information available you will find links to download sample benchmark output by clicking here. Additionally, a copy of our Benchmarking whitepaper is available for download.

Sample Deliverables:

Typical Benchmarking program deliverables include the ability to rank the performance of a given function in a credible manner that frequently includes a related performance improvement effort.

For a national specialty apparel chain we identified key merchandising benchmarks that were utilized to structure and focus a massive total company improvement effort
For a specialty store chain our team members performed a store layout and design benchmark study to determine how the chain ranked in new store opening efficiency
For a well-known regional supermarket chain our team members performed a shrink study and benchmarked the firm against other competitors in the industry. The focus created triggered a department focused shrink reduction effort culminating in a (recurring) shrink reduction in excess of $25 million dollars annually

Store Operations Benchmarking Customer Service Food Operations Merchandising Inventory Management Distribution IT Systems Supply Chain Training Programs Organizational Restructure Expert Witness Services Due Diligence Services