The solution
1.Why monday.com?
After assessing the options in the market, FashionBrand identified 3 platforms and wanted to shortlist the best one that would suit their requirements and help keep everyone aligned with the retail management process across the company.
“My first impression of monday.com was that it was very intuitive,” says James. Transfunnel conducted a platform demo for FashionBrands’ stakeholders to showcase that monday.com was easy to set up, customize, and get started.
2.monday.com Roll Out
Transfunnels’ team started by working with each department to map out their core business process retail. They then identified the most efficient workflows and made sure these were applied uniformly across the business.
The Transfunnel team identified what FashionBrands needed to see from a reporting standpoint and worked backwards from there. Overall, their priorities were to:
- easily visualize workload by store, department, and team members,
- better identify gaps and allocate resources, and
- track if anything was at risk of falling behind schedule.
FashionBrand partnered with Transfunnel’s implementation team to get the ball rolling. They began by building initial boards, dashboards, templates, and automations. Then, James’ team ran trials with select teams and fine-tuned the processes before launching more widely.
“The Transfunnel team has been great to work with,” says James. “They gave us a lot of advice to build and streamline the workflows of fashion retail management, best present it to the wider business, and onboard all the different stakeholders onto the system.”
Infact, once the platform was rolled out, FashionBrands was impressed how quickly people got onboard and started using it.
3.Easy Collaboration on planograms with one customizable platform
FashionBrand continually enhances its product range on a massive scale. For example, in the previous financial year, it added 7,800+ new products to stores, removed over 6,900 products, and had approximately 9,000 pieces of movable merchandise equipment in each store.
To help manage this logistical challenge, FashionBrand space planning team has been using digital planograms that illustrate the exact placement of products, fixtures, shelving units, and promotional displays.
Before monday.com, teams were using spreadsheets to manage 2,883 planograms across 4 departments. It was a complex headache including manual processes, multiple versions, lack of visibility, and no centralized reporting.
“Using monday.com has transformed our planogram management processes from chaos to a structured approach,” says Shami, Merchandise Process Analyst at FashionBrand.
“With synchronized planograms and detailed Gantt charts, there is full visibility across the business about product updates. It’s easy to see what products are in store, manage product updates, and keep each store up to date on changes.”
Transfunnel team worked with Fashion Brands team to create new product boards which also featured a ‘Why’ column to explain the rationale for innovations and the key benefits, with an understanding of the strategy.
“Now, everyone knows when changes are happening and why. It’s not just change for the sake of change. Stores love this,” says James.
4.Enhancing planograms
FashionBrand runs a merchandise lab which is a physical mock store where space planners cross-check the product specifications, layouts, shelving, and promotional displays and add photos or videos of merchandise displays to the planograms on monday.com to show stores the new range and exactly how the layout should look.
This clearly enhances the visibility for the whole team.
5.Streamlining all the steps needed for a successful product launch
On top of managing day-to-day inventory merchandising across its national network, FashionBrand launches over 15 major product launches and national promotions at regular intervals throughout the year. Each of these is a significant undertaking.
Each launch involves over 50 tasks to coordinate between several cross-functional teams.
“Speed, efficiency, and collaboration are the keys to a successful launch,” says James. “Deadlines are critically important at every step. We must make sure enough products are on shelves in every store on launch day ready to meet demand.”
Transfunnel team helped Fashion Brands systemize the product onboarding workflows using monday.com. The workflow setup includes:
- Detailed applications are submitted in an online form and routed for review.
- Once approved, resources are automatically assigned the tasks needed to get new products on shelves (right from updating store planograms to ordering inventory, to notifying store managers.)
- Automated reminder notifications and alerts keep everyone on track, prevent last-minute surprises, and stop tasks from falling through the cracks. Delays are flagged quickly so people can jump on board and move it forward.
Managing everything, from high-level strategy to detailed execution
In his day-to-day role, Shami drills down into the details of each product. But a bird’s eye view of the business processes from the top down is essential. Transfunnel team worked with Shami and Leadership to setup monday Portfolio Boards that connect to all projects and present well structured, summarized views for leadership.
“What monday.com does well is allow for different views for different users right down to a specific function,” says James.
“So, I can see a high-level view of projects across the business or look at my team’s progress, and individuals can look at specific projects, tasks, and subtasks relevant to their priorities.”
