BIG BAZAAR-LOWER PAREL

The best way to understand the way a retail store functions is to begin with the shop floor or the warehouse. Only at the shop floor will you be able to learn your products, understand the store and your customers better. The operations team to my knowledge and experience is the best place to be in a retail industry as you get exposed to all the verticals like operations, marketing, HR functions, project handling, visual merchandising, logistics, etc. To work in a retail store you need to have the passion and eagerness to work. You need to have the potential in you to deliver, spend more time on the shop floor, sacrifice the daily entertainment activities, public holidays, the Sundays, etc. You need to mentally mould yourself to submit yourself to the lifestyle of retailing. Here when the world enjoys you are required to assist them to enjoy more at your cost of enjoyment. That it-self is a task and if you can achieve this it in itself is a great feeling of achievement and satisfaction. Here you get to meet many different types of customers, from different cast, creed, different places, and having different lifestyle. Here customersunlike marketing people come to visit you and that itself is a great fun as you get to understand different types of people of different nature from whom you get to learn a lot every day. Store operations involve a continuous learning process. ItStore operations teaches you to become stronger, become more aggressive, more confident, and get exposed to extreme situations and to tackle all sorts of activities or situations as and when it comes. The best thing of store operations is you do not have to wait for the work to come; you get it or create one at all the time. You will be learning new things every day, every moment. It makes you act effectively and think at all stages. There are many fields within the store operations where you can put your thoughts into action. The best part in a retail store operations is you get to incubate your thoughts into action, can become very initiative and also get to learn from the errors you create. Sometimes the errors caused by it-self may become an entry level for fresh thoughts to come in and create something new at the shop floor. It also makes you more systematic, disciplined as it teaches you to schedule your work process and get tuned to it. The best part in a store operation is its activities differs on week days and on weekends and public or bank holidays, reason being the activities within a store depends onis in to the customer walk-ins. The more the walk-ins more is the activity.

Back in India I was impressed by the way organised retail had come up. I felt very happy as this industry was coming up in a big way, and especially because I started my career in this industry. Many malls and individual super stores and shops were coming up or were planning to be set up in most of the western and central suburbs of Mumbai. I was very eager to visit one such mall in south Mumbai. I was extremely fascinated by the way the mall had come up. It was very much similar to the malls that I had visited abroad. I spent almost an entire day visiting all the shops within the mall. I did some bit of shopping, moved around within various outlets to understand the way they operated, made some observations, and also got into a casual conversation with many of the sales employees. Every day I used to visit one of the malls in the suburbs, and get into either window shopping or just interacting with some of the floor staffs. During these visits I used to observe the day to day operational activities within the stores, how it was different from the other stores, which activity was unique to that store, or what was not right in the store, and so on. What I observed was that some retailers were efficient in setting up the standard store ambience, some were experts in service standards, some were efficient in stacking stocks, or some were experts in service as well procuring stocks and so on. Overall what I observed was that every one of the retailer was a master in one of these parameters or all of them. But still what I could experience was there was still lot of commotion within the store when it comes to billing a product, no proper trial rooms, crowd around the one existing, or handling the customer flow on week ends, or managing the operations within the store. I am sure you must have surely experienced this sometimes, somewhere in one of the outlets in a mall you had visited.
The main reason for this is the absence of proper systems and processes or if present then not adhering to the same. To ensure all activities within the store is run smoothly proper processes need to be in place. Most of the activities within the store operations is mainly process driven. Hence it is very essential to enforce Standard Operating Procedures - (SOP). It is a pre-designed document officially approved by the management, hence an official method of getting all work done. One should ensure that when these processes are designed and implemented it should benefit both, the customer as well as the employee. if it does not benefit any one then its existence is not justified.
The most common activities within a store are:
Merchandising
Visual merchandising
Receiving and out-warding stocks
Schemes and offers
Week end activities and Events
Customer service