1.0 Role-based dashboards – a summary
Retail business executives want dashboards to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make optimal business decisions. Therefore ARC Dashboards acknowledge that different people responsible for different roles and activities in a retail organization need to look at information in different ways at different times. Yet, all the different perspectives and points of view must align with one another and ultimately with a company’s strategic objectives and targets.
ARC Dashboards focus on the intersection of a user’s business function (merchandising, promotions, supplier performance and finance, for example) and their level in the organization: strategic, operational or tactical.
Dashboards in ARC provide this focus on the intersection along with alignment of these intersections:
- Cross-functional alignment
- Cross-layer alignment
- Role-to-role alignment
- Alignment with strategy
2.0 Role-based dashboard – a scenario
Category Managers are often expected to identify category marketing cost reduction strategies, recommend short and long term sourcing possibilities, provide risk/benefit analyses, evaluate and negotiate with suppliers, manage cost reduction programs both pre and post implementation and provide benchmarking against key competitors. In a typical food & grocery retail business, category management processes help manage the complexity of 200+categories, 300000 or more items, multiple geographies and hundreds of stores, while making the right decisions at the right time.
To effectively practice the art and science of category management, managers need to consider the relationships between various macro factors like competition, markets, customers, vendors, products, channels, as well as micro factors (tactical initiatives) like assortment, allocation, shelf presentation, pricing and promotions, in order to drive profitable growth.
With ARC Dashboards, buyers and merchandisers can easily monitor, analyze and manage their category management processes at strategic, tactical and operational levels. It also enables them to perform a holistic and in-depth analysis of the business performance by linking strategy to execution in a closed-loop analytic framework.
2.1 SWOT dashboard for merchandisers
