Overview

Point of sale, stock, staff, tasks, technology and footfall sit in separate systems, each with its own report, its own cadence and its own truth. There is enough data, there is no picture. Only six percent of retail companies reach the maturity threshold at which data supports their decisions, the average across all industries is 16 percent, and most cite legacy systems that cannot be connected as the obstacle.

The revenue figure alone explains nothing. A decline can be less footfall, a poorer conversion, a smaller receipt or an empty shelf, and each of these causes requires a different answer. Conversion falls as footfall rises, as has been measured, and without footfall alongside it a good day is read as a bad one.

Cortex places point of sale, stock, staff, tasks, technology and footfall from the existing sources in one time grid and maintains a normal profile per store against which every day is read. The overview replaces no system, it connects them, and in the morning it shows where this day deviates from the plan.

Priority

Alerts and dashboards from point of sale, inventory management, warehouse, staff planning, sensors, task system and marketing converge on one person who runs the store, and what matters gets lost in the volume. Frontline managers spend 30 to 60 percent of their time on administration and meetings and only 10 to 40 percent leading their teams, as McKinsey described it in 2009 across all industries.

Cortex sorts by revenue and service impact. One list per role, every task with reason and time window, and the metric is not the number of alerts but the share that leads to action. What does not matter in this hour waits without getting lost.

Intervention

The day deviates from the normal profile, due to weather, holidays, a local event or a late delivery. Depending on location, weather alone moves a store’s daily revenue by up to 23.1 percent, and weather data improves the revenue forecast up to seven days in advance. The correction belongs in the course of the day, not in the weekly report, because by then the opportunity to correct is gone.

Cortex reports the deviation while the day can still be corrected and assigns the task to the role that can carry it out, open a checkout, bring replenishment forward, redeploy staff, follow up on a promotion. What is measured is the time from problem to action and the loss that was thereby avoided.

Network

Stores respond differently to the same central action, and headquarters only sees the difference in the report. At a retailer with over 500 stores, customers found obstructed aisles 18 percent of the time on average, between five and 55 percent depending on the store, and the staff budget per store was adjusted once a month. What is decided centrally only works if it is implemented locally, and how well differs from door to door.

The same grid in every store makes comparison possible. Cortex shows headquarters the deviation from the standard per store and the time to intervention, and what works at one location becomes the rule for the next ones. Whether it worked is answered by impact measurement, and store management turns from a report about yesterday into a situation that can be managed today.