Reducing Cycle Time in Store Openings 

 

In value Chain, total inventory is reduced from 320 to 220 million TL. 

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Opportunity

For retail, new stores are essential for growth and companies

have aggressive targets for number of new stores. In a new

store to be opened each day passed is a loss of revenue and

profit. The objective of this project is reducing cycle time of

spent to open a new store. 

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Execution

In this project, it was crucial to gather all the requirements of

stakeholders. Therefore a swimlane process map is drawn

with key members of the process.

Then, we have measured the time spent for store openings.

This created enlightenment in the company, as it has never

been done before.

Process is reviewed with a lean perspective and time

reducing opportunities and mudas are explained. Activities

are classified into value adding, non-value adding and

obligatory.

To resolve and finish these opportunities stakeholders are

determined and listened. Their requirements are collected

and elicited.

Plenty of brainstorming sessions are organized to reduce

time or eliminate activity by keeping loyalty to government

and companies’ procedures. Nevertheless, some procedures

are considered as inhibiting store-opening process.

Therefore I applied with procedure change requests in favor

of our project to different management units such as law,

accounting and finance departments.

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Conclusion

The store opening time is reduced from 29 days to 17 days.

This improvement totally made by lean six sigma

perspective. The essence of the project stem from the fact

that the company opens 1,000 stores per year.