By Ashish Patel
Retail store managers and business owners have many tasks at hand from the start to the end of the day. Apart from delighting customers, a manager’s main task is to increase the productivity of their team. This can be across various ad-hoc, manual, and repetitive tasks. A retail store manager needs to maintain multiple spreadsheets and audit checklists to keep track of various processes and activities. These activities include fashion alteration management, trolley & basket management, baggage management, inventory checklists, promotional offers, and more. However, retail store managers often do not have programming experience to build mobile enabled apps for managing day to day tasks.
Amazon Honeycode is a fully managed service, which allows customers, like a retail store manager, to quickly build powerful mobile and web applications with no code. Honeycode is made up of familiar spreadsheet models enabling you to build business applications in minutes and collaborate between team members to increase business productivity. Honeycode applications are accessible over web or mobile which is especially important for companies with limited space to support computers for every employee.
In this blog post, you'll learn how to adapt multiple spreadsheets and turn them into a fully functioning application. For the sake of this post, we describe a fashion retail company use case.
Prerequisites
You simply need an Amazon Honeycode account, which you can sign up (Amazon Honeycode) for free.
Fashion alteration management
In most scenarios, a cashier maintains the Alteration Register, capturing Alteration details - 1. Alteration Slip number, 2. Cashmemo/Invoice number, 3. Number of pieces to alter, 4. Customer details - Name, Mobile no / email id and 5. Alteration movement time details. The tailor maintains the Tailor Register, capturing additional alteration details - 1. Product code & description, 2. Alteration size, and 3. Delivered time. Collaboration between Cashier, Tailor, and Store manager is manual with Cashier & Tailor maintaining their respective sheets.
Solution overview
Using Honeycode, you transform fashion alteration spreadsheets that track progress and collaboration across three roles into three apps:
- Fashion alteration management application. This is used by cashiers and alteration executives (here referred to as cashier).
- Tailor alteration management application used by tailors.
- Alteration dashboard used by retail store managers.
Fashion alteration management process
The cashier initiates the process by taking an alteration order from an existing or a new customer, and assigns it to an available tailor. In many cases, tailors are freelancers so there’s a provision to add multiple of them. The tailor uses the app to check the queue with a Pending status and mark to In Progress, and then Completed upon completion. This sends a notification to the cashier to inform the customer their order is available for pickup or delivery. It then marks the task as Delivered upon customer’s successful alteration acceptance.
The store manager tracks the overall progress through the alteration dashboard and takes corrective measures in case required. The process optionally tracks the payment to the tailor based on the product type and delivered alteration orders. In addition, the store manager can mark the respective alteration order as Tailor Paid upon payment to the respective tailor.
Step-1: Fashion Alteration Management App
There are built-in templates in Honeycode, which is the best way to start. Since this use case was similar to the “Field Service Agent” template, I started with this one and modified it for the Fashion Alteration Management process.
The Fashion Alteration Management App is shared with Cashiers and they can only access this App. Cashiers will use this app to capture Customer and Fashion merchandise alteration details.
1. Customers
Cashiers click on the Customers tab to search and view existing customers or to create a new customer.
2. New Alteration Order
Cashiers click on the New Alteration Order tab to create new alteration order for an existing customer or new customer.
3. Fashion Alteration Management
Cashiers click on the Fashion Alteration Management tab to manage existing alteration orders created by them. They can then take action on Delivery Ready orders to contact the respective customer and mark Delivered post successful acceptance.
Step-2: Tailor Alteration Management App
Tailors click on the Tailor Alteration Management tab to manage assigned alteration orders. Before working on an alteration order, they mark the alteration order to In Progress, and then mark as Completed once the alteration is finished. They can also check the total due alteration amount from the previously delivered alteration orders.
Step-3: Alteration Dashboard App
Store Managers click on the Executives Summary tab to check the cashier workload and progress. They view the Tailors Summary tab to check progress on alteration execution, and use the Alteration Dashboard tab to check the overall progress, and to pay tailors for their due alteration amount.
What’s Next
Amazon Honeycode also enables you to build polls, surveys, approval workflows, schedules, checklists, and more unique solutions. You can refer to the built-in templates (Amazon Honeycode) to quickly get started. Honeycode comes with built in Automations with notifications and reminders, API integrations to connect with AWS Platform Services, and external Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. You can refer to the recent announcement (Integrate Amazon Honeycode with popular SaaS applications, AWS services, and more) for more details.
Mobile is already in the main stream of everything we do. Building business applications without any code is extremely valuable for business operations teams, such as retail store managers. Business operations teams can automate ad-hoc, mundane, and repetitive tasks in addition to increase your team's productivity using Honeycode.
Note: Names and Contact numbers are fictitious in Demo clips and images.
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