Wooqer

With the rapid evolution and expansion of the Indian retail environment, Madura F&L’s ability to morph in response to market demands and consumer needs is nonnegotiable. Engaging and managing their workforce is highly important as success within the retail industry is directly correlated to supporting a consistent brand image and providing a superior customer experience. With broadly distributed locations and employee base, it is crucial that consistent standard operating procedures be established and implemented to facilitate their ambitious expansion plans. To address this issue, Madura F&L should implement a cloud platform such as Wooqer to achieve operational effectiveness while enabling flexibility and real time collaboration to support consistency and innovation. In the effort to capitalize upon the rapidly growing apparel sector, leadership at Madura looks to increase revenues by increasing market share through expanding to new store locations. Arising with this geographic expansion is the critical need for efficient management of training, compliance, and SOPs. Coverage and consistency of these procedures is imperative to the operational efficiency and positioning of Madura, as a superior customer experience could not be delivered without a clear knowledge of the company, brand, and product. Customization and flexibility is also important to MF&L as within a changing, competitive, and diverse environment, it is essential to innovation and establishing a competitive advantage in delivering value. With competition increasing within the sector, the assurance of quality, consistency, and superior customer experience is key to success and longevity. With values that honor human touch, empowerment, responsiveness to consumer needs, and effective communication, MF&L looks to enhance their strategic positioning by harnessing the power of technology to implement a comprehensive approach that reflects these values. With operations over 5 channels and over 200 cities with 8 premium brands, maintaining effective informational systems and consistent standard operating procedures are essential to enabling Madura’s alignment with their company values. Engaging, developing, and managing the MF&L workforce is first priority as the complexity of managing operations intensifies with expansion. The workforce must be well educated on SOPs, enabled with the resources to successful complete all requirements, and monitored to ensure quality. Given the geographic and demographic diversity of their locations, customization of the training modules must be enabled to facilitate responsiveness to customer needs through the empowerment of leadership, without violating consistency. Current IT solutions available to Madura lacked sufficient consistency and coverage capabilities and were ineffective in managing remote programs. Very few solutions were able to assist in SOP training compliance monitoring. These solutions also hindered Madura’s ability to innovate and adapt to changes in their company’s process, which in turn delayed access to pertinent business information resulting in ineffectiveness. Venkatagiri and Prakash state, “…large-scale IT systems were found to be rigid on the strategic front. ERP systems were criticized for prescribing business processes, rather than accommodating them”(2013). Significant investments have been made by MF&L that arguably are capable of satisfying the future demands of the growing company. Multiple platforms were integrated to form a solution that addressed many of the issues faced in the early 2000’s. Their successful implementation of the ERP and SAP greatly improved the consistency of their implementation systems. However, though these strategies successfully enhanced their business practices, gaps still remained in communication, flexibility, and collaboration. “…it was difficult to incorporate mid-course changes as and when the company’s processes evolved. Consequently, any gaps in execution were patched by mechanisms such as emails, spreadsheets, phone calls, and SMS messages. This led to business information becoming inefficient to access”(Venkatagiri and Prakash, 2013). However, by choosing a more malleable solution such as Wooqer, not only would issues regarding the consistency in the training and management of the workforce be addressed, but business practices would be streamlined allowing for resource optimization. “…immediate benefits included the streamlining of various processes that were already running across the organization …we found ourselves being able to achieve a lot more with the same set of resources”(Prasad, 2012). With high user centricity and no infrastructure requirements, customization to specific roles, individuals, and geographies is enabled promoting innovation. “Wooqer has assisted in the democratization of ideas by making sharing of ideas and thoughts more free and open. It has also helped in seeking a majority opinion before implementing the key operational decisions” (Prasad, 2012). Consistent coverage and quality assurance would be ensured as training modules, skills training, etc., could be provided online and feedback from consumers could be instantly addressed. Real-time analysis and reporting is also supported by a platform such as Wooqer, which increases operational effectiveness. With primary data sources readily available, effective decisions can quickly be made. “The platform’s analytics offered real-time visibility into usage patterns…client firms began to derive actionable insights on what was working and what was not. This led to better effort allocation and cost optimization across stores”(Venkatagiri and Prakash, 2013). Clients implementing Wooqer’s platform experienced approximately a 28% increase in consistency, 3x increase in coverage, and an 87% reduction in effort (Exhibit 10, p10). As MF&L moves towards expansion, it is critical that they align their IT strategy with their goal of maintaining value. Effectively engaging and managing their workforce are issues that must be addressed as consistency of operation is essential to the success of Madura F&L. To achieve this goal, a service such as Wooqer should be implemented to assist in integrating their business practices to enhance communication, collaboration, and innovation. By utilizing such a technology, the crucial establishment of consistent SOPs would be enabled, supporting its future expansion.