Wellness Forever is a 24-hour online medical store chain, headquartered in Mumbai, operating in 171+ cities in the states of Maharashtra, Goa, and Karnataka in India. It primarily offers a wide range of healthcare and hygiene products for babies and women and men of all ages.
Wellness Forever has established a benchmark in the industry. The brand has been able to establish a strong foothold over the market with its omnichannel presence. This has extended their customer journey but has also provided them with an opportunity to deliver better customer experience. With its app-based ordering, customers need not wait for days to get their essentials delivered from another city or state but instead, the delivery takes place from a nearby chemist.
In this article, we will try to briefly cover what goes in to build a brand like Wellness Forever.
Tech-driven Inventory Management
Inventory management plays a crucial role in making or breaking a retail business. Maintaining the optimum level of inventory consistently is necessary. Stock deficiency in a store will make customers look elsewhere while stock excess will result in space crunch and unnecessary increase in holding costs.
Planning and tracking the storage and movement of thousands of products manually can be inefficient and if done manually, then it will lead to several discrepancies. It is highly advisable to have an auto-replenishment system (ARS) in place which is a computerized and automatic system for tracking inventory levels and reordering based on a product’s lead time and reorder levels. An ARS system will help you achieve higher efficiency levels in inventory management with less judgemental errors, placing and getting orders on time, and preventing delays. The whole idea behind retail pharmacy inventory management is to stock the optimal level of inventory using technology as a medium.
Retail Chain Operations Management
When you are operating in multiple cities and states with hundreds of stores, it is important to have unanimity and standardized operations across every store. This is a critical requirement for managing retail pharmacy operations. To build brand credibility via the consistency of service, businesses need to strive for having standardized operations across all the stores. Now, the question is, how can you achieve such levels of standardization? The answer is standard operating procedures for retail pharmacy. There needs to be planned and well-defined process manuals for every store operation.
Strong middle-level management will ensure that decisions taken by the top executives are being implemented in the right way at the operational level. This gives the company a strong shade right in the middle of its organization structure. These are the people who oversee the business operations at one end and work closely with the people leading the company on the other. They serve as a connecting medium between company-wide strategies and grass-root level implementation.
Strong Backend Support
In any retail business, a great frontal performance always requires as good backend support. For example, if inventory management is weak, order fulfilment is likely to be deficient. If digital marketing campaigns fail to deliver the message precisely, it will create confusion between the employees and customers in the store. Thus, the front-end and back-end teams need to work in cohesion and coordination making the business run smoothly in all the departments.
It is the responsibility of a business enterprise to build such an operational platform where different departments can work like one big working unit. Organizations need to be process-driven for that. With the use of business IT systems like ERP, departmental coordination is further improved. Proper SOPs will act as a connecting link between the operational activities of the different departments.
Appropriate IT Systems
When we say IT for business operations, we are not even talking about AI or automation or software applications that cost a fortune. We are referring to any tool and technology that works for your business. If your business requires AI, be it AI. If it is as simple as a WhatsApp number for your customers to place their orders, that is it. The aim is to make your business operations smooth and in tune with your business strategies and requirements.
As we grow in business, our operational requirements also change. As we used an instance earlier that if your inventory team has to handle thousands of products on a daily basis, technologies like bar code, ARS, auto-packaging, etc. can be immensely helpful. If there are thousands of customers, analytics tools can be used to get meaningful insights on customer behaviour and their tastes and preferences to further improve customer experience and customer journey. For a medical store, an appropriate IT software solution would be a medical store management system or a medical store inventory management system. For omnichannel businesses, choosing the right omnichannel digital solutions is crucial.
Logistics and Distribution Strategy
With the widening scope of marketing, logistics and distribution form essential elements of a business plan. These are no longer isolated processes to be thought of or planned separately from the rest of the business.
In omnichannel pharma retail, businesses need to ensure the quickest and most efficient delivery of orders from source to destination. And two important questions to be answered here are:
- Where will the products be sourced from?
- How to deliver it to customers?
Unlike eCommerce marketplaces, many omnichannel retail brands utilize the existing local retail markets as a part of their logistics and distribution strategy so that the delivery timeframes could be brought down to hours.
Centralized Distribution
Under a centralized distribution hub model, companies maintain a central warehousing and distribution facility to and from which the flow of inventory takes place. There are several benefits to this model. First of all, it makes the task of inventory management and distribution organized. Secondly, if done right, it can prove to be efficient as against maintaining multiple smaller distribution centres. Thirdly, the better focus can be laid on service through SOPs, better manpower, and advanced equipment and technologies. Fourthly, better 3PL service providers can be attracted because of higher inventory volume and quality of service and operational infrastructure.
Summing up
Behind the success of brands like Wellness Forever, there is always a robust operational framework of which we tried to cover only a few aspects. From tech-driven inventory management to appropriate business-IT systems, we saw how crucial technology is for business growth and establishing a strong brand. A stronger middle level management acts as a connecting force between vision and implementation. The operations of all the departments need to be synchronized for the overall smooth functioning of an enterprise. SOPs are indispensable. And affecting the tail of the customer journey is the logistics and distribution strategy. The future of brick and mortar is omnichannel and such businesses need to start considering building an eCommerce business plan.