WTF's Struggles: Lower Sales & Moderate Traffic in South California - Essay Sample

Introduction

WalnutTreeFood (WTF) is a store chain that deals with groceries regionally in more than 200 locations in South California. WTF's target population since its establishment has been affluent customers that prioritize wholesomeness and quality rather than price and gimmicks. Increased competition from whole foods and the merger of Amazon Company has made WTF experience lower sales than previous quarters. Stores have reported more moderate traffic, and if the trends continued in such a way, the company is faced with the challenge of closing various locations and downsizing its operations. The major failure in WTF Company is that it did not invest in systems of information. Hence, its store traffic varies depending on the unscientific data that is compiled by store management. The fact that WTF has failed to invest in systems to enhance the adequate flow of information and entirely depend on unscientific data compiled by store management is an excellent explanation as to what has caused major reductions in sales and profits. The team mandated with the leadership of this company attributes the lower sales experienced in the company to be due to the defections of regular customers to other Whole Foods and the Amazon Fresh grocery. Various opportunities exist, and if utilized effectively, they can help WTF to improve its customer loyalty and engagement and increase sales, which will surely enhance the profitability of the company. The defection of customers causes the lower sales in WTF Company to other whole foods as well as the grocery delivery services of Amazon, and to reduce the losses it currently faces. WTF should invest in information systems that will make it easier for the management to compile the correct data.

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CRM and ERP

The first problem with WTF Company is that it has cash registers that can connect to modern cloud and information systems such as Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning. Still, they are not used, and instead, the management of the company has adopted a manual input of daily sales reports. The task of printing the reports on large receipts and then manually re-entering the data into a Google spreadsheet the next day is a sure way for the possibilities of mistakes in data inputs that leads to losses in the company. Reporting and checking whether data is correct takes a lot of time, and it has had a lot of expenses on the WTF Company.

Recommendations

The company should make proper use of the ERP and the CRM to increase the overall profits it gets. Both of these systems will help to improve efficiency and sales while attracting more customers to the grocery store (Tomic & Jovanovic, 2016). The CRM software will play a major role in the management of the interactions of a company with existing and potential customers because when it is effectively used, it will make organizing, automating and synchronizing of sales easier. The best CRM software that the company should purchase is Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. The company should also connect the CRM systems to cash registers such as Microsoft Dynamics for Finance and Operations.

It will also help to improve marketing strategies and customer services. Another advantage of the company adopting CRM is that it will include all necessary areas of the experiences of the company, which will help to keep the customers happy and, in turn, make them stay loyal and add value to the business (Tomic & Jovanovic, 2016). The CRM system will also help to maintain a good relationship with any new customer that comes to the business; hence repeat customers increase improving the sales in the company.

Making proper use of the ERP system already in the company will help to manage the business through an improvement of the efficiency of all business processes (Stojkic, Veza & Bošnjak, 2016). The ERP will make sharing of standardized information in all departments of the company easier hence the time data reaches the corporate office reduces with the accuracy of the data increasing.

The company's employees will also find it easy to enter information into the ERP systems, which will help to create real-time information rather than altered data that benefit a few individuals. In contrast, the company faces losses (Stojkic, Veza & Bošnjak, 2016). Problems that arise in any department of the company will automatically create alerts making it easier to plan for the issues before they spread to other departments. Adoption of the ERP system will allow the company to focus on data instead of operations; hence business processes will easily be streamlined across the board.

Inventory Management Technology

The second problem with WTF Company that has caused its gradual losses and a possibility of shutting down most of its branches is a lack of inventory management technology. The company has four employees in each store that goes through the data in the cash registers while performing inventory duties. The recording and storing of inventories are done manually, and it can take one week to deliver the inventory data from each store in the company to the corporate office. The delays in the delivery of the inventories create risks of loss of data and products and cartels altering with the data for personal benefits. Some stores in the company have various shortages, while others face surpluses due to lack of central inventory management.

Recommendations

The WTF Company should adopt an inventory management system which will help in tracking of goods across the supply chains. Using manual systems such as Excel documents and spreadsheets is only effective in small businesses. This explains why the WTF Company has found it hard to maintain its customers and sales (Kok, 2018). The inventory management systems that WTF Company will adopt include the Automated Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) and the Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) chips.

The RFID system will be effective in dispatching goods for delivery and providing management with real-time inventory tracking. It will also help in-stock notifications as sends alerts when there is an over or under stocking (Kok, 2018). This technology will help the company to offer promotions in the form of discounts to their customers; hence the probability of return customers and more sales will increase.

The AIDC systems, such as barcode scanning, should be adopted in the WTF Company to make identification and tracking of products more accessible. Integration with barcode scanners will also make instant labeling and identification of products easier while simplifying the process of viewing the history of the most popular product sales in the company (Jonsson & Mattsson, 2019). This technology should be integrated with the report generation feature to help in the management of items in the company’s inventory that have not yet reached the levels of sales that are expected.

Another effective way through which WTF Company should improve its sales and client satisfaction is through the adoption of multi-location management which will help in the management of various stores of the company using a point-of-sale technology (Jonsson & Mattsson, 2019). The POS system will make it easier for the management to integrate all orders, sales, and inventories.

Automated Payroll

The third problem in WTF Company that has caused a significant decline in its profits is the manual payroll that is performed using timeclocks and timecards. The manager calculates the hours of each employee manually. After the hours of each employee are calculated, they are manually entered into accounting software at the store level, which is not centralized at the main office. The manual entries of payrolls also lead to the hiring of poor performing employees in different locations.

Each store prints its reports and faxes them to the corporate office for final feeding into the corporate office's accounting system. The manual way of calculating the working hours of each employee is bound to create disparities that place the company's employees at risk of getting wrong salaries. The effects of this include high turnover rates and negative worker-client relationships, making the clients search for another company whose employees treat them better.

Recommendations

WTF Company should adopt an automatic payroll that will make tracking of the time each employee spends in the company, the expenses they use, and the projects they finish more comfortable saving the management a lot of time and effort (Yudina et al., 2018). The management will, therefore, have more free time to improve the activities in the company and major on activities that will improve the products and services of the company to its clients (Yudina et al., 2018). The automatic payroll will also help to reduce the errors realized in the manual system of generating pays for the employees; hence their level of satisfaction will increase.

Increased employee satisfaction leads to lower turnover rates and more will to make the clients happy hence more return rates and sales. The automatic payroll software that the company should incorporate in its technology includes QuickBooks, Ultipro, Pensoft, and Z-Pay, which will make it easier to calculate the earnings of all employees based on data that the payroll representative records (Gupta, Kundu & Das, 2019). Automatic payrolls also help to reduce cases of employees tarnishing the name of the company with a claim of poor or lack of payments, which may decrease the number of customers buying from the company.

Human Resource Management System

The WTF Company does not have an effective HR management; hence, each store uses paper applications tracked at the store level. The hiring and termination of employees are dependent on the manager of each store with no consistency. The lack of automated systems that keeps records of all new employees and those that are terminated due to different reasons creates chances of the terminated employees in one store getting employed in another store belonging to WTF Company, and their bad performances continue being experienced in the company. The corporate office does not have access to the written templates; hence they have no idea of all employees that have ever been employed in the company.

Recommendations

The management of WTF Company should create a central Human Resource Management System and department to ensure that all employees that are employed or sacked get proper documentation and recognition (Odun-Ayo et al., 2017). Each employee should have a number to help identify them, and all information about them should be recorded in a well-managed system that is located in the corporate offices. The store managers should automatically record information of existing and new employees and send such names to the corporate office where all employees' names are compiled and stored.

Adopting this trend will reduce the chances of an employee getting laid off in one of the Company's stores due to a bad reputation and getting employed in another store. The human resources department will also track employees' abilities, skills, accomplishments, and salaries (Onik, Miraz & Kim, 2018). The company will, therefore, only employ and retain employees with high performances and those that value customers. They, in return, play a major role in ensuring that they offer the customers the best experience in the company, creating chances for returning customers.

Customer Loyalty Program

WTF Company gives customers a few cents that they can use off the gas at Gilligan's Gas Station locations. It is an excellent offer to the customers, but most of them either use uber and Lyft or electric vehicles, making it hard for the usefulness of this loya...