Trading Manager helps you plan and execute retail activities and projects. It helps you achieve targets and reduce costs on any activity that's planned at the centre for execution in the stores.

Time for a planning revolution. Easier, quicker, now.

Planning and executing retail activities is very hard work. There's lots to go wrong. Many functions get involved, and co-ordinating all the different stakeholders is a challenge. There's also no shortage of interested parties - one Trading Manager customer identified 20 individual functions or departments, from Buying to Training, all intimately concerned with their current range review planning process.

The trend, not surprisingly, is towards increasing estate agility: more frequent activities with tighter timescales, shorter lead times, higher complexity and more stakeholders.

If the planning process can't cope, the business picks up the pieces; any errors in central planning inexorably become highly-visible errors of execution in the stores. Errors that hurt customer experience, the bottom line and the brand at the same time. Get it right first time, however, and you enhance customer loyalty, drive profitability and ensure brand integrity.

Do you look forward to upping the tempo of change armed with the spreadsheets, documents and tools you use today? If not, read on: Trading Manager could be just what you need to get the estate acting as a well-oiled, profitable machine.

What about tools?

People use spreadsheets, documents and Gantt charts to keep a handle on the big-picture, and all these planning documents have to be shared across all the participants. The trouble is, as projects get more complex, more dynamic and have less slack, the number of changes skyrocket until it's impossible to keep track. Updates get missed, dependencies are overlooked, and the project can start looking like a panic.

Trading Manager is designed specifically to solve these problems: to make sure your large retail projects succeed.

A word about terminology
Different organisations use different terminology - in this document we use the word 'project' as a catch-all. Projects include Major Category Reviews, Range Layouts, Seasonal Layouts, Amendments, Events and Promotions and other activities like store openings or training. If it's planned at the centre for execution by all or a subset of stores, you can use Trading Manager to improve it.

How could Trading Manager help you?

Trading Manager focuses on retail projects - anything planned at the centre for execution by all or a subset of stores, with a lead-time of up to a year. If your estate is 5000 stores or 5, Trading Manager can help.

Trading Manager uses project management concepts in a framework designed for retail tasks and retail estates. It's a powerful tool designed by retail people, for retail people.

What happens when Trading Manager helps out?

Visibility for all

In many head offices when projects are being planned, copies of spreadsheets, documents and project plans fly around trying to keep all the participants up-to-speed. Multiple copies of everything make it difficult to keep the plan up-to-date and, as activities get more dynamic and more numerous, the number of changes increase until it’s impossible to properly manage the process.

Trading Manager lets everyone involved in the project collaborate effectively. All activities, their dependencies and accountability are visible to all participants in one place - actions, project documents, everything. Not multiple copies of different versions in scattered mailboxes, but one single copy of the truth, clearly and unambiguously displayed, instantly available.

And not just for a single project. All current (and planned) projects are visible to the right people, so collisions and workload peaks are visible and avoidable. Project Owners can slot projects into the plan and move them around with clear understanding of the impact on the bigger picture. Nothing gets into the plan without agreement, understanding of ramifications, stakeholder commitment and sign off.

Who does what - clear roles and responsibilities

Gatekeepers, Project Owners and Stakeholders are all clearly identified, and their responsibilities and capabilities are clear. Not until everyone has signed up does an activity become live. Things don't go off at half cock or fall through cracks when Trading Manager's around.

Task Management - clarity of task and status

One place to see:

• your actions and your departments' actions: completed, pending, overdue, in date and priority order
• project documents and notes
• outstanding actions for all relevant projects
• issues with late or problematic milestones or escalations

Everything has an owner. No excuses, no confusion, no out-of-sync copies in mailboxes.
The left hand knows what the right hand's doing.

Templates capture success

With Trading Manager you can quickly assemble project plans from templates: proven components that represent all the experience gained from past activities. Projects don't have to rely for their success on information only stored in people's heads. With Trading Manager templates you can build successful projects quickly, capture experience and capitalise on success.

Labour overhead calculation - costing at your fingertips

If you tell Trading Manager how long it takes to work on an in-store item and the relevant labour rate, you get cost estimates for the project that reflect the actual workload in all affected stores.

Improvement built in

You can't improve without feedback, and in the past it's been difficult to get clear, timely, actionable feedback from all participating stores about their execution problems and experiences.

Not any more. Trading Manager surveys provide you near real-time feedback from the stores or any other stakeholders. You can catch problems early (and fix them cheaply), and improve your project templates so the same mistakes don't happen again. Your projects get faster, easier and more successful and less of a black art.

Trading Manager comes with pre-defined surveys, covering:

• pre-implementation readiness
• implementation status
• post implementation reporting

So there's a pre-built feedback loop ready to go the first time you use the product. But there's more - you can build your own surveys too, as many as you want. The possibilities for smarter retailing are endless..

Accurate forecasts, illuminating reviews, penetrating analysis

You get an unrivalled set of Capacity, Commercial, Project, Survey and Usage reports built in. A powerful reporting engine gives you complete visibility across your projects, activities, statuses, costs and benefits.

Trading Manager summary

• Trading Manager revolutionises the planning and execution of retail projects.
• It gives visibility of all projects and tasks to all planning participants and makes accountability clear.
• Project management is simple and effective for even the largest, most complex projects.
• Project templates capture experience and knowledge, so excellent projects can be built quickly.
• Immediate feedback from stores improves quality and cuts the cost of execution.
• Reports communicate activities, statuses, costs and benefits.

Would you like to learn more?

This site is full of customer stories, product briefs and solution summaries that will give you a good feel for how Trading Manager and other members of the Retail Manager family can help you to achieve your business objectives. Or please, pick up the phone - 02380 816000 - one of the team would love to hear what you'd like to achieve, and see if Trading Manager could help you too.