Retail Trends

How do you perform against your competitors?

2 min read

buttonRetailing is a highly competitive industry and success can be frustratingly short-lived. Retail leaders must not only outperform their rivals but also work hard to improve their leadership position. But just how can you improve your business objectively?

“if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” is a widely quoted phrase in business management. The idea that a successful business needs to be based on measurable outcomes will be familiar to many managers as intuitively it makes a lot of sense.

The importance of metrics

You cannot know whether you are successful or not unless unless have first defined “success” and you cannot know well you are performing against that goal of success unless you have tools to track your progress.

Of course, all retailers set themselves goals – to increase revenue by x percent, to reduce stockouts by y percent and so on. These types of goal are useful but they are internal goals designed to measure how well a company improves over a given time period not against the competition.

Competitive benchmarking

A successful retailer needs to be able to measure how well it is performing against its rivals. This process, called competitive benchmarking, is extremely valuable because it allows companies to look at the performance of key processes in the business and compare them with similar processes in its direct rivals.

Competitive benchmarking has traditionally been a capability that only the largest companies have been able to access. It is costly and time-intensive as it typically requires anonymous benchmarking studies conducted by or consultants.

Nevertheless, the principles of competitive benchmarking can also be applied to qualitative data sets that do not require access to proprietary quantative data from industry rivals.

Openbravo Competitive Assessment Tool for Retailers

This method has been used to develop Openbravo’s new Competitive Assessment Tool for Retailers.

We adopted the quiz format to make the assessment tool  quick and easy to use. And we went to considerable effort to ensure both the relevance of the questions and the validity of the scoring system used to determine the degree of competitiveness.

The 15 questions cover enough areas and are sufficiently granular to give a realistic picture of how the retailer is performing against its industry peers on five key fronts: customer experience, product and pricing, order fulfilment, inventory management, and technology.

So if you have often wondered how you measure up against your rivals, now is the chance to find out! Click here to start the assessment.

 

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