Our last article discussed the much claimed “easy to use”; and there is still much more to say on this topic. For now however we concluded that, as a minimum, a sports retailer needs a system in which it is easy to “enter many size/colour combinations for a single product within a matter of seconds – and to then, in one action, to be able to quickly find and assess that complete product with all its SKU combinations “.
This article reviews the other side of the “it’s easy” coin – the “it’s so powerful” claim. Being able to put different sizes/colours into a system speedily and to be able to find all the sizes and colours in one action is not enough. There is the time factor; what does “quickly find and assess that complete product” mean. Imagine if the underlying system was designed to deal with products where there was just one number for each product’s overall stock quantity – where the system was not really designed to handle situations where one product has 20-60 variations of size and colour.
In this situation it could take 5 seconds to 5 minutes for all the information you need for a product to appear on your screen. Faster computer hardware will of course speed this up, but if the software was not designed for the job of handling size/colour then as you add more and more data it will go slower and slower. But does this matter? Yes, very much is the answer.
When you have a lot to do you need to move through things quickly, you do not want to spend more time waiting than actually working. Just to get an idea of how frustrating a five second delay can be try reading from the next semi colon with a five second wait between each word; it will drive you mad with frustration. The few words (starting at “;it will…”) that could normally be read in two seconds will take over 30 seconds – it’s definitely not how you want to spend the next few years of you retail management life!
Imagine this effect multiplied by the minutes, hours, days and months you will be using a system. If on a well designed system you could do all you need in an hour or two a day; in the “not designed for sportswear” system you could work for eight hours every day of the week and still have work to do when you go home. Being realistic, you will simply start cutting more and more corners, get through less work, get less analysis and make less money.
And the problem does not get any better when you consider that you also need to keep all your sales data by size/colour, plus all your order information. In addition there is the issue of sizes and colours at your branches, which adds still more data.
It is vital that you test the system with a typical data load. For a sports retailer this is, say 1500 to 5,000 products with stock, sales and orders by size/colour – all multiplied by the number of outlets you have. See if it’s as fast as the initial demo, see if the frustration-lag time delay is below one second or above 3 seconds.
At least now we have the beginnings of an “easy v powerful” definition for the sportswear retailer. “Easy” is the ability to enter many size/colour combinations for a single product within a matter of seconds. “Powerful” is the ability to retrieve this data at near instant speeds for stock, sales and orders by product, size and colour.
But although this is a good beginning it is not enough. The two elements come together when you look at the issue of how the information is presented – so our next article looks at the question of clarity and we will examine the “it’s really clear” claim.