Country Road Group has set up a central hub based on monday.com to manage and coordinate store and department store concession planning projects across its five retail fashion brands.
Credit: Country Road Group
The group – which is home to Country Road, Mimco, Trenery, Witchery and Politix – set up monday.com as a new work management platform, having previously coordinated projects via spreadsheets and meetings.
“There was a lot of time wasted going back-and-forth between revisions from the designers to the planners, double handling each other’s work, and just constantly sifting through different emails just to understand where we were at for each project,” store planning manager Swithin Oliver told a monday.com Elevate conference.
The store planning function coordinates the work of designers, project managers and other stakeholders on “over 15” types of work, ranging from new store openings to refurbishment or relocation of an existing store.
More recently, projects have focused on re-establishing concessions – branded spaces within department stores, notably Myer.
“Last year, we re-entered all our brands into the Myer department stores, and so we ended up having this real influx of work in that concession space,” Oliver said.
“We had to think about how we work through these rollouts. If you think about Country Road as a brand, it’s got a home department, a kid’s department, a women’s department and a men’s department, so if you just put Country Road in one Myer department store, you’ve got four projects.
“But if you take all our brands and you put [them] in there, you’ve got up to nine different projects.”
An immediate benefit of the new work management platform is being able to create a consolidated view of related works, rather than have a dashboard for the running of each project.
“Instead of having to trigger nine different boards, we thought that we could have one board that represents all nine of those projects,” Oliver said.
“The overarching board becomes that Myer department [store], and those nine projects we can facilitate within that one board.”
Multiplied across the footprint of Myer stores that Country Road Group has worked in, Oliver said that “over 150” concession spaces had been built, which were represented visually from a project management perspective “in less than 50 boards.”
It’s a similar story for store planning more broadly.
There is a “main pipeline board” that is used to track store planning projects by brand, and as a “bird’s eye view to understand quickly what the project status is and critical dates [that] we need to communicate back to the business.”
Automations associated with that board generate timelines, allocate resourcing, and adjust these based on changes that may be observed as the project tracks towards its intended completion date.
Individual project status is currently manually reflected on the main board, but work is underway to automate this. The data comes from a day-to-day operation board that feeds up to the main board.
Oliver said that a number of “interactive views” are possible with the main board, such as around resourcing and workload for each fashion brand.
The group currently exports project statuses via a spreadsheet that is regularly shared with key internal stakeholders; however, the plan is to enable a monday.com link to be shared that would allow stakeholders to view the data directly on the monday.com platform.
The use of monday.com enabled Country Road Group to set up “a central hub and a one stop shop for our projects.”
“It means we can stay simplified and focused on the task at hand,” Oliver said.
“We also now have one source of truth, so we can go back after we finish the project, and go back into that board, and we can do a reflection exercise to look at all the things that we’ve done right, and some opportunities where we can improve. We never used to be able to do that.”
Oliver quantitatively estimated a 25 percent efficiency improvement for project management as a result of the initiative.