4 Key pillars for digital maturity in retail operations

But how does digital maturity and the resilience of your retail operations tie together?

In a publication looking at how companies were affected by the pandemic, Boston Consulting Group found that the most digitally mature companies were much more resilient during the crisis than their less digitally mature competitors.

This wasn’t because their market valuations were unaffected by the economic impact of the pandemic, but because after taking a big hit at the start of the pandemic, these companies rebounded quicker than their competitors.

In their research, BCG found that within six months, the valuations of the most digitally mature companies were 23% above their precrisis levels on average, while the least digitally mature companies only managed an average of 7% growth over the same period of time. 

This survey perfectly sums up the importance of digital maturity in retail operations, but there’s a question on how to go about maturing your business when it comes to digitalization.

When is it digital maturity, and when is it just jumping the bandwagon and going along with the latest trend? What is it about some companies that makes them more digitally mature than others? 

A digitally mature company is more than just the latest technology and the newest systems, it is as much about how digitalization is implemented as it is implementing new technologies.

We’ve been digging into research on digital maturity in retail operations and that has resulted in these 4 tips on how to improve the digital maturity in your retail operations.

1. Understand the state of your commercial operations

It’s a lot more difficult to know where to go, if you don’t know where you are coming from, so the first thing you need to do is to understand the state of your operations.

You can always integrate new marketing technologies, but first you need to find out if your organization is even ready for new technologies. And if not, you need to figure out what needs to change in your organization to ensure that it is. 

When you know exactly which areas of your commercial operations are optimized and which are causing hiccups in your processes, you can move on to try and improve them. But there’s no point in attempting to fix things that are already working smoothly.

2. Break the silos in your retail operations

Silos are one of the biggest challenges in most organizations. In fact, cross-departmental collaboration is such a business critical challenge that 86% of leaders blamed lack of collaboration for business failures in a survey by recruiting company Zippia.

So, before we start discussing digital maturity, we need everyone to be on board, aligned and seamlessly working towards the same goal. Even if your marketing operations, for instance, are sufficiently streamlined within the department, it doesn’t mean that other departments, partners, suppliers or other collaborators are.

Work management technologies help provide a way around this issue, as they allow you to structure workflows across different departments and stakeholders to ensure a more efficient collaboration. 

And especially when we’re talking about retail operations, there’s a good chance that the stakeholders for your key processes are not part of the same team. For instance, promotion planning usually includes people from category and pricing, sales, marketing and even external stakeholders from agencies, suppliers etc. 

Because of that, it’s a good investment to integrate processes across the entire supply chain—from product conceptualization to the shelf.

But silos aren’t just about people and cross-departmental collaboration. 

There are operational silos too. 

For instance, having your Product Information Management live a life separate from your Digital Asset Management creates a gap between product information and promotional material which in a best case scenario leads to a decrease in efficiency, and in the worst case leads to misinformation in material that only relies on one of the sources.

This is why it’s more and more common to see PIM and DAM systems merge and become part of a wider content hub which helps create a single source of truth.

3. Establish resilient processes in your retail operations

Making sure that workflows and processes bridge the gaps between all project collaborators is just the first step, the next is to make sure that your workflows and processes are resilient and easy to follow.

If your operations start moving around certain processes, or skipping complicated steps, there’s no chance for you to optimize them efficiently. 

Ideally a workflow is one straightforward process. This is as true for content management as it is for marketing automation or commercial operations. This ties back to the need to break system siloes. If you have separate logins, separate websites, separate administrators and so on, a single project could have you log in and out of three or more systems.

This will make the project feel jagged, disjointed, not at all optimized, which in turn will lead to errors and missed deadlines.

4. Lead the way!

While enforcing the digital maturity in your retail operations is very much an internal project, it also moves beyond your own organization, which means you also need to experiment with how you can be more dynamic in working with your partners, suppliers, and other external stakeholders. 

And you can’t wait for others to set a standard, or expect them to improve their own processes for your benefit, but if you set the standard and design your operations to improve their way of working as well, there’s a good chance they will follow your lead without much question.

This means you also need to take a look at the platforms and people interact with your retail operations. Even if you have ideal processes internally, you need to consider the outside sources and how they affect your organization.

An example could be your suppliers and the supplier portal they work in, or your advertising agency and the digital asset management system they use to create, review, distribute and store assets.

These are workflows that take place outside of your organization, but that doesn’t mean their efficiency doesn’t affect your retail operations, and because of that, improving them could ultimately improve your own performance.