Implementation: New Store Setup

Trility led a Discovery engagement that clearly defined the problem and created an Implementation Roadmap. The client now desired Trility’s expertise in the first phase of that journey.

The client had traditionally added a few large box stores annually. As market conditions changed, they quickly needed to open large and smaller stores at a higher volume and the existing process impeded growth. 

Due to legacy systems and decentralized data, both finance and IT had redundant, manual processes for opening stores and reporting on the varying products and services sold. The new locations also spanned new time zones and led to critical issues for end-users and older IT systems. 

No centralized documentation for the entire workflow existed. Legacy, bug-laden applications impeding centralized data and automation. Interdependencies induced bottlenecks and disruption to finance, IT, and additional areas of business. IT and engineering teams were seeing growing frustration all while retention was also becoming an increasingly industry-wide challenge.

Using the Implementation Roadmap, Trility’s approach focused on stabilizing and improving existing processes, centralizing workflow, accelerating time to revenue, and prioritizing the areas with the largest impact on productivity and ROI. Key aspects addressed:

• Identifying and removing hard coding to allow variable parent-to-child relationships within lines of business and modifying reporting applications to handle these new variables. 

• Implementing a  single source of truth and process tracking for business and IT tasks. 

• Developing visualization around key processes for business and IT teams.

• Centralizing documentation for improved support and maintenance with minimal loss of knowledge transfer, including an established pre-install checklist and a “Gold Standard” configuration to maintain and evolve for future store models.

The client received a predictable and repeatable new store setup that allowed for improved communication, more automation, and more robust functionality for internal teams.

• Bring transparency to overall timeline, department/team status, dependencies, and reduce overall costs due to reduction of unplanned work and overtime hours by eliminating unexpected activities.

• Enhance new store setup application with additional features such as allowing stores to easily customize products and services offered, and resolve defects in applications and processes hindering workflow.

• Validate quality of data to reduce errors in an automated way by building a testing framework for a distribution management database.

• Move towards unified data, establish centralized pricing, and improve ability to further the organizational goal of sunsetting mainframe computing needs.

• Aid in the formation of a New Store Setup team focused on formalizing best practices and evolving the Gold Standard.