It’s one thing to be ready in advance of the holiday shopping season, but what happens after the last customer has made the last purchase and the holiday comes to an end? It’s time to look back and assess how well you executed your plan and make some notes for next season.

Too often, the best of intentions gets away from us as we deal with post-holiday business, but the fact is that next season is just a few months away, so taking some time just as one season closes is a great proactive investment in turning in an even better season next year!

At Sensormatic, we realize that you know your business better than anyone else. In fact, it’s for that reason that we wanted to supply you with a starting point for your assessment. Our goal is to give you a customizable tool that focuses on the critical metrics for the holiday season and links them to their impact on your business, focusing on the root cause behaviors that drove your results. Additionally, it helps you link each metric to other groups within your company so that you can better partner across your organization. Teamwork should help improve execution faster than going solo!

Feel free to download a copy of the assessment for yourself. Here’s what you will get:

• An Excel workbook with three tabs: Postmortem, Top Focus Areas, Blank Postmortem Page.
• The Postmortem tab is your starting point, and it is broken down into three general areas: Asset Protection Management, Inventory Intelligence, and Shopper Engagement.
• Within each section, we have listed several metrics as a starting point. If these metrics aren’t your focus, feel free to change them to anything else that makes sense for your business.
• Next to each metric, we have included areas for you to list your plan and actual result for the metric, plus we have given you a starting point to list what business areas/results the metric Impacts, the Key Stakeholders within your organization that you can partner with to work through the metric results, what Root Cause Gaps are influencing your results (these should mostly be behaviors to be addressed) and also some other metrics to consider that are Related Metrics to the key indicator. Finally, below each metric is an open cell for you to type in any notes pertaining to the metric that you want to remember for next season. There is also a Flag Icon between Results and Impact that has a drop-down box that you can turn red by selecting Flag from the choice so that you don’t forget an important note or result.
• All of our starting point assessment is completely editable so that you can customize it for your own needs.
• In fact, if you want a blank template, simply start entering your own KPIs in the third tab: the blank postmortem page.
• The Top Focus Areas tab provides you with space to pick out the critical few metrics that you want to plan to address for next season, together with a space to record your action plan.

Make this Holiday Postmortem Assessment your own. If you want to discuss this with us or need some help on how best to get insights into your own results, feel free to contact us.