Event Management Solution: SWL-EVENTMANAGER

Helping retailers to clearly plan and communicate to store managers all the essential events that hit stores throughout the year, for example key peak trade promotions.

All event plans go through a common governance process to ensure only the most profitable and strategically-aligned events are approved. The solution includes a real-time feedback loop to report store event compliance, and facilitate continual learning and improvement.

Critical to a successful business and protecting or enhancing market share is consistently high compliance with key sales-enhancing events and best practices. Up until now the biggest challenge has been how central teams can improve their reach into every operational team, and manage and track their compliance against key corporate events and consistently improve standards.

SWL is helping retail businesses in their execution of in-store ‘events’, through SWL-EVENTMANAGER. This enables head office to scope new store events, communicate them to stores (what it is, who does it, when should it be done, how should it be done, and why everyone benefits from doing it), and track execution in real-time across the estate.

This not only tells head office how complete an event is at any time, but how compliant stores have been, i.e. did they perform their activities within the allotted timeframe. Additionally it helps retailers to identify the consequences of late execution, i.e. a delay in the set-up of a new promotion by ‘n’ days will cost the business £n in lost sales.

A Simple Process for Better Event Execution

SWL’s event management solution will enable head office teams to:

• Specify the objectives and descriptions of each event
• Break down the events by all activities that have to be performed in order to complete the event as effectively as possible
• Specify
• Who does it (e.g. management or staff)
• When it should be started and finished by
• How long it should take in hours
• What the event and activities consist of (including attachments, e.g. planograms)
• Where it should be done (which stores and are included in this event), and
• Why everyone will benefit from buying into the event and doing it
• Communicate the events to stores and check receipt of messages
• Track completion and compliance against these events when they go live, and get a clear indication of what non-compliance is likely to cost the business
• Invite and monitor feedback to get opinions from store staff as to what worked and what didn’t, with suggestions for future improvements

Combining this powerful ’non business as usual’ event management with SWL’s labour modelling, budgeting and profiling tools for business as usual activities, this helps retailers to manage their entire labour budgets more effectively, whilst facilitating better business agility, reacting quicker to the dynamic needs of all stakeholders.