Executive Education
Certified Senior Leader Buying and Merchandising Programme for Reliance Retail Executives
Jio Institute along with Reliance Retail Sourcing, Buying & Merchandising Academy organised a "Certified Senior Leader Buying and Merchandising programme" for senior leaders of Reliance Retail. The programme saw 39 participants from various divisions of Reliance Retail participate in a 4-month long program, delivered by Mr Srikanth Gokhale, Former Group CEO, of Landmark Group, Dubai. The program focuses on in-depth foundations of the Buying and Merchandising function from broad strategies, market intelligence, and customer centricity to detailed aspects such as product and category management, inventory management and essential soft skills like leadership and team building.
Last Conducted On: 29 Feb 2024 - 21 Jun 2024
Mode: In-person at Ulwe Campus
Upcoming Sessions
To be announced
About Reliance Retail
Reliance Retail, a pivotal initiative of Reliance Industries Limited is an Indian retail company and a subsidiary of Reliance Industries. Founded in 2006, it is the largest retailer in India in terms of revenue. Guided by principles of inclusion and sustainable value, it has swiftly cultivated enduring connections with millions of consumers through diverse store formats. As India's largest retailer, Reliance Retail operates across Grocery, Consumer Electronics, Fashion & Lifestyle, and Pharma. With 249 million registered customers and 780 million footfalls in FY23, it stands as one of the world's fastest-growing retailers, ranking 53rd globally. The multi-pronged approach includes brands like Fresh Signature, Reliance Digital, AJIO, and Netmeds. Reliance Retail, with a turnover of Rs. 2,60,364 crores in FY23, operates 18,040 stores, impacting socio economic transformation on an extraordinary scale.
Programme Overview
This comprehensive course is designed to equip senior leaders with the knowledge and skills required to make strategic buying and merchandising decisions in today's competitive marketplace. The program was attended by Senior Leaders from divisions such as Reliance Grocery business, AJIO, trends, Electronics Business, Staple Sourcing, and many others.
The programme focused on an in-depth understanding of the buying and merchandising processes, exploring best practices, and developing the ability to optimize product assortments, enhance customer experience, and drive profitability for their organizations.
Mr Srikant Gokhale, Former Group CEO, of Landmark Group, Dubai, and Lecturer of marketing – at the University of California, Berkeley, Hass School of Business, delved into various topics of Buying and Merchandising.
The programme is divided into 7 modules delivered across 4 months in hybrid mode. The first three sessions of 4 modules, happened in offline mode, on 29th Feb and 1st March 2024, 11th and 12th April 2024 and 10th and 11th of May, 2024 respectively.
Learning Outcomes
The Executive Education programme conducted by Jio Institute along with Reliance Retail Sourcing, Buying & Merchandising Academy has yielded significant learning outcomes.
- Enable Strategic Thinking: Participants will develop a perspective of strategic buying and merchandising and understand the role of strategy in value creation. This will help them create an impact by improving sales and gross profits on a sustainable basis.
- Transformation into Business Leaders: The programme enables the participants to gain leadership skills by taking initiative, solving problems and collaborating with people from varied backgrounds.
- Thinking from a Customer Perspective: The focus will be to make the participants understand customer trends, behaviours and insights and how to use them to provide a better customer experience.
- Insights into data-driven category management: With various case studies and examples, data will be used to bring forward insights into market trends, pricing strategies, growth drivers and many more, that help in category management.
- Adopt new-age techniques: The programme will bring best practices, the latest and cutting-edge strategic toolkit/ framework based on research and professional experience, to the participants and enable them to adopt these techniques in their work environment.
Participants will delve into advanced strategies, data-driven approaches, and innovative techniques to optimise product assortments, drive customer engagement, and achieve sustainable growth in a rapidly evolving retail landscape.
Programme Synopsis
Module 1: Orientation to Buying & Merchandising
- Welcome Address & Setting the Context
- Understanding Global Retail Trends
- Financial Acumen for Business Leaders
- Developing Strategic Perspective, Role & Importance of Buying and Merchandising in Value Creation.\
- Understanding the concept of Strategy & Value Proposition
- Group workshop – Application of case studies to real life
Module 2: Building Customer Centricity
- Understanding Customer Trends, Behaviour and Insights
- Customer profiling, Customer Segmentation
- Creating an engaging customer experience through Buying and Merchandising
- Creating Customer Loyalty & Customer Centric Retailing
- Role of Virtual Merchandising in enhancing customer experience
- Innovative store layouts & Product Mix from the Customer perspective
- Group workshop – Application of case studies to real life.
- Key Learnings, key Concepts, feedback and Discussion
Module 3: Product and Category Management
- Product Management - Which product to select and why: Criteria for choosing products
- Develop pricing strategies that balance profitability and customer value.
- Product mix, Product bundling, and Size of products
- Demand and Forecasting, Assortment Planning
- Pricing and Margin Management
- Understanding drivers to growth
- Concept of freshness and newness, Unique products
- Why Private labels and how to manage them
- Importance of Involvement of frontline store team in decision-making
- Importance of training the frontline team and aligning incentives
Module 4: Business Insights & Market Intelligence
- Understanding competition- pricing, promotions
- Visiting stores: Observing customers
- Analysing data: how much top 30% - SKUS, Customers, and Stores contribute to sales and profitability
- Concept of dynamic pricing
- Developing store-segmented strategy
Module 5: Inventory management
- Understanding the importance of Inventory Management for BM and how it impacts profitability
- Merchandise planning and inventory optimization techniques
- Managing end-of-season, excess inventory
- Replenishment process
- Inventory accuracy
- Managing stock levels and reducing holding costs
- Innovation in managing inventory- How to reduce overall inventory: latest best practices
Module 6: Negotiation & Vendor Management
- Buying process: Buying to maximize profits
- Sourcing strategy- Volumes, risks, Quality
- Developing vendor relationship
- Evaluating vendor performance
- Negotiation to create a win-win
- Managing Suppliers: Supplier payables, Suppliers’ discounts, and supports
Module 7: Developing as Leaders in Buying & Merchandising
- How to develop as leaders: Effective communication, learning from failures, strategic vision, motivating and developing team, goal alignment, taking timely corrective actions
- Measure the success of buying and merchandising initiatives through relevant performance metrics
- Foster collaboration between buying and merchandising teams to align with broader organizational goals
- Capstone case to bring the overall learning
- Future of BM in a retail organization
- Presentation of projects by the group
Speakers
Srikant Gokhale
Former Group CEO, of Landmark Group, Dubai | Lecturer of Marketing, Hass School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, USA