In retail, a broken process looks like an ordinary day

When owners picture a broken process, they picture crowds, raised voices and customers walking out. In a shop it almost never looks like that. The tills work, the shelves are full, the store manager answers the phone. A broken process looks like a perfectly ordinary day in which people sort out small things as they go. Those small things are the process.

Five small things you see every week

The shelf price and the till price

The price was changed in the system on Tuesday. New labels were printed, but not all of them reached the shelves. A customer picks up an item at the shelf price, and the till rings up a different one. The cashier calls the store manager, who approves the lower price to avoid a scene. Two minutes, sorted, and nobody records it anywhere.

Stock that travels between shops by phone

One shop has run out of an item; another has plenty. The two managers agree it over the phone, and a driver drops the box off on his way. The transfer gets booked in the system two days later, or not at all, so the next stocktake shows a surplus in one shop and a shortfall in the other.

Refunds done however each person knows

One cashier processes a refund as a void, another pays cash out of the till with a handwritten note, a third calls the manager. At the end of the day the till doesn’t balance, and people look for the difference in the wrong place.

Ordering by feel

Every Friday the store manager walks the shelves and orders whatever looks low. An experienced manager does this well. When they are on holiday, their stand-in orders too much of one thing and too little of another.

Best-before dates noticed too late

Goods nearing their date get noticed once the date has passed. Instead of a markdown a few days earlier, there is a write-off at the end of the month.

Why none of it shows

Everyone patches their own bit. The cashier, the manager and the driver each fix their small problem in a minute or two. Nobody sees the total.

The cost is sliced thin. A discount at the till, an extra trip, a write-off, an hour spent hunting for a till discrepancy — each lands in a different part of the books, and none is big enough to raise an alarm.

Reports show sales, not effort. Turnover per shop is visible every day. How many calls, arrangements and corrections that turnover took is visible nowhere.

How to find it

Compare two shops

Pick one task, say refunds or goods receipt, and see how it is done in two of your shops. If they do it differently, you don’t have a process; you have two habits. Neither is necessarily bad, but they can’t both be the best.

Ask what gets done outside the system

Sit down with cashiers and store managers and ask a simple question: what do you do that doesn’t go through the till or the system? Notebooks under the counter, lists stuck to the fridge, colleagues’ numbers from other shops — all of it is a map of places where no process exists.

Follow one product for a week

From the price change, to the shelf and the till, to a refund or a write-off. Wherever the product gets snagged, that is where the gap is.

Where people usually start

With small things that show quickly and are easy to measure:

• a price change that reaches the till and the shelf at the same moment, with a list of labels to print generated as soon as the price changes
• transfers between shops recorded when the goods leave, not when someone gets round to entering them
• one refund procedure at every till, with the reason for the refund recorded
• an alert for goods approaching their date, early enough to mark them down

None of this asks the shop to work differently from how it works today. It only asks that what people already do is done once, in one place.

To see how a day like that is mapped and moved into a system, read our business digitalisation and automation page. If you run one or more shops and would like to walk through an ordinary day together, get in touch.