Some retail and hospitality customers come to Bindy from a competing retail or hospitality execution platform they have outgrown or find too expensive. Others come from a workflow developed in house. It usually involves Excel™, email, phone calls and a large amount of human sweat equity to compile the data that was collected.
Anyone who has ever experienced the pain of collecting, distributing and compiling site data like this starts thinking…there must be a better way! Well, there is.
Let us take you through the life cycle of the audit, with Excel and Email vs. Bindy.
Note that we refer to this activity as an “audit“, although it may also be called “visit”, “inspection” or “assessment”.
Step 1: Schedule the audit
On time, in full, at every site
Excel™ and Email
The auditor schedules the audit using the company’s group calendar application. But watch out! Some audits are unannounced and should not be disclosed to the store’s management ahead of time. So schedule and notify recipients carefully!
Bindy
Log-in to Bindy. Schedule a audit with the built-in calendar. Check-off whether the audit is announced or not. Let Bindy do the rest: handle all the messaging, send reminders and control visibility by user role.
Boost business at every site
Step 2: Prepare for the audit
Excel™ and Email
Dig up these old reports! Check your emails and notes. Compare and analyze past audits. Manually compile and look for trends, repeat unacceptables and location to district averages. If you have any notes, prepare them ahead of time and save them to the Excel™ spreadsheet.
Bindy
Log-in to Bindy. Look up the store and past audits, pull ready-made reports and look at the trends, repeat unacceptables and location to district averages. Add your notes to the scheduled audit (notes will be automatically rolled into the audit when it starts).
Step 3: Conduct the audit
Excel™ and Email
Using your laptop, open the Excel™ spreadsheet for the audit. Include the information about the store, information about you and the current date and time. Now fill-out the form. Be careful not to drop your laptop as you walk around and remember to click save often not to lose any data!
Bindy
Log-in to Bindy using a smartphone, tablet or laptop. Click “Start inspection”. Geolocation selects the location you are in, all location details and dates are pre-set. Walk around the location and fill-out the form (one hand operation can be used on the mobile). Don’t worry if your device loses battery, or if you want to use a different device, you can switch device at any time and pick up where you left off!
Step 4: Action plan and follow-up
Excel™ and Email
Finalize the audit spreadsheet and create an action plan. Email this audit and action plan to the store and perhaps copy your director. Remember to follow up with the store in a week to make sure that deficiencies are being addressed. If you manage multiple stores, you will need a process to manage audits, follow-ups and reminders.
Bindy
Assign deficiencies to individuals using the built-in action plan. Let the system contact the individuals responsible and let the system indicate what has or hasn’t been done, by whom, where and when. You can get an up-to-the-minute report, for one store or all stores, at any time.
Step 5: Sign the Visit
Excel™ and Email
There is no native ability in Excel to “sign” a visit. Some operators resort to printing which is cumbersome and breaks the premise of an electronic workflow that is accessible and viewable from anywhere. Paper is slow, expensive and gets lost.
Bindy
The system allows the brand to designate users who are allowed to sign and “sign off” on the visit on a form-by-form basis. This provides a record of integrity and locks the visit from further edits. Sign the visit electronically with any touch screen device (or even a mouse!).
Step 6: Reporting
Excel™ and Email
Want to know your best/worst locations, items, regions and programs? It’s data-crunching time with Excel™! You will soon experience a syndrome known as “Excel Induced Headache”. Excel™ is a powerful business tool but it was never designed for complex data analytics (of course, you already know this, you have just spent 4 hours trying to compile data across a dozen spreadsheets).
Bindy
Log-in to Bindy. Chose one of the 27 canned reports. Best and worst locations, items, programs, etc… Look at trends, repeat unacceptables… No calculations, no formulas, no linked spreadsheets to deal with. Just “click” and have your data summarized and compiled. And yes, you can still use Excel™! All Bindy reports are exportable to Excel™ or PDF.
Conclusion
When we went paper less, we all assumed we’d magically become more efficient. Whiz-bang, look at us saving data in Excel!
However, you can be just as inefficient with technology as you can without. Capturing data electronically in Excel does not, in and of itself, make the process efficient.
Excel was not designed for this. It a spreadsheet program, it excels (pun intended) at calculating and compiling numeric values. It is not a field execution tool, it is not a workflow engine.
When used for brand standards and execution, Excel is slow, labor-intensive and error-prone. It also deprives the organization of the real-time analytics it needs to make informed business decisions.
Excel and email are not helping your business, they are holding it back.
LEARN MORE ABOUT BINDY
Refer to the Bindy category for more information on how the world’s leading brands use Bindy to execute brand standards with inspections, corrective action plans and tasks.
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