Speaking of the Same Shoe

"For the love of shoes," fashion lovers flock to Town Shoes, one of Canada's favorite destinations for hot designer names such as Skechers, Diesel, BCBG, UGG, Steve Madden and many other world famous designer labels. For the past 17 years, The Shoe Company, a subsidiary of Town Shoes, has sold shoes, clothing, accessories and handbags designed for the entire family at discount prices. The retailer continues to grow its store base in Canada with an average of five store openings a year.

Town Shoes launched an online store in 2006 to provide customers with the opportunity to shop from home. The Web site features hundreds of styles to choose from, an "Ask Shoezy" section, celebrity and event photos and a Shoe-aholic Confession Box where shoppers can post messages about their latest product purchases and share stories with other shoe lovers.

For years, The Shoe Company has struggled with communicating with its store managers and associates via internal e-mail and paper-based methods. The retailer relied on an internal e-mail system that provided limited communication from the stores to the district office. E-mails were deleted and there was no guarantee that store managers communicated these critical messages to their store associates.

In order to boost communication throughout the chain, The Shoe Company recently deployed Store Ops-Center from Opterus across all of its locations. In late Fall 2007, the retailer began testing the system in eight of its stores. Since June 2008, 70 stores have been operating on the system.

Store Ops-Center now provides The Shoe Company with an "eye-in-the-sky" view of store operations and replaces the retailer's manual communications methods through an on-demand retail portal that ensures message delivery and verification of operational compliance issues.

The Store Ops-Center provides a dashboard report at a glance that clearly displays which tasks have been completed and which have not. Major and minor issues are posted on the dashboard and designated to individual store associates or store managers. Tasks cannot be ignored because the issue must be signed off on and closed before it is removed from the dashboard. The system also can issue tasks automatically via smartphone.
"Numerous verification steps are involved since the system runs reports showing what people have and have not read, sends messages, designates tasks and action items and communicates other issues," says Lewis Feinstein, vice president of operations, The Shoe Company.

Remarkably, the entire software implementation was completed in less than a week across all stores.

"Most retail software projects are very demanding on internal resources and take time to implement," says Feinstein. "It took only days to plan and go live with Store Ops-Center and our employees love using it because it's easy, and it works well while greatly streamlining our store operations."

Since implementation, The Shoe Company has reported that store efficiency has improved by 20 percent. Additionally, the retailer has reported substantial increases in the amount of tasks that are completed. According to Feinstein, prior to implementing Store Ops-Center, roughly 50 percent of tasks were completed on time. Since adding the Store Ops-Center, nearly 90 percent of jobs are completed.

The transition to Store Ops-Center has been extremely smooth for the retailer. "You would expect that some people would be resistant to change, but people loved the Store Ops-Center," says Feinstein. "Head office training was minimal. With the new system, roughly eight hours a week are saved. Reminders are sent and flagged and there is a much higher level of compliance for store-based reporting."