KPI's For Breakfast

What flew off the shelves last week? What missed the mark? How do we compare to last year? Which promotion to extend? Who to send them to? Every Monday morning begins relatively the same way for this prestigious Canadian bed and bath retailer; all department heads are brought up to speed with the previous week's sales and a stack of reports to rifle through. Only now, things have changed; with the implementation of Easy Retail Inc.'s EasyDashboard KPI solution, management deal only with the issues that require immediate attention, viewing the business from many different angles including store, vendor and product performance, or any combined views of these KPI's, allowing them to focus on the core business and future planning.

Linen Chest Inc., a Montreal-based Bed and Bath chain, began in 1962 as a one store, 250 sq. ft. location founded by Sylvia Leibner and has blossomed to 13 large-scale locations, owned and operated by her sons, Stan and Sheldon Leibner. In a few short years, plans have changed from stabilizing to expansion mode, largely due to the KPI's they now monitor on a weekly basis with the applications provided by Easy Retail and the guidance of retail consultant and software creator, Jacques Azoulay.

Easy Retail worked closely with Linen Chest's IT team to integrate the Dashboard and Planning applications to their existing JDA MMS retail solution. Mr. Stan Leibner, Co-owner, Linen Chest, was the main catalyst in implementing the change and helped the project stay on track. "Jacques and his team delivered exactly what was promised. We've never had such visibility into our performance across the board. This fresh perspective was even used to make some major changes in how we fundamentally run the business, to the point where we have opened up new concept stores based on the 80/20 rule in smaller store footprints, thereby optimizing staff and square footage productivity. The results have been spectacular!" touted Mr. Leibner.

Internationally renowned and respected retail consultant, Jim Dion, agrees that KPI's are necessary for tomorrow's retail environment the race will be won by those retailers who know what to measure, why they are measuring, what changes they need to make to effect those measures and do it consistently every hour of every day."

Mr. Leibner added, "We have pinpointed specific operational deficiencies with this tool. For example, store returns are monitored, and in this specific case, were highlighted as above the norm. Our supervisor looked into the problem, and we were able to stop the bleeding before things got out of hand."

Easy Retail Inc. provides key retail chain applications to layer onto existing merchandising and inventory JDA's MMS and Microsoft's Retail Management System (RMS). The suite includes EasyDashboard – Key Performance Monitoring, EasyPlan – Integrated Sales & Open to Buy Planning, EasyCRMDashboard – Customer KPI's and EasyWages – Sales and Productivity Management.

SOURCE: Easy Retail Inc.