Small And Large Business Inventory Control
Hechinger officials are keeping their chins up. Small business inventory management software pointed to the company's ability to attract personnel from competitors as a sign of a brighter future. The company recently hired Don Stallings, whose most recent job was as Lowe's regional vice president for the southwest region. Stallings is Hechinger's new executive vice president-operations, taking over Marty Bocola's post. Bocola's new role is as executive vice president-support division, responsible for installed sales, commercial sales, loss prevention, store planning and personnel. Other management additions have to do with the company's regionalization. Hechinger now has three geographic divisions --which are internally referred to simply as Divisions I, II and III -- each overseen by a divisional vice president. Division I, comprised of 93 stores located mostly in New York, New England, Michigan and Illinois, is the responsibility of new hire Bruce Teter, formerly with Sam's Club. Greg Jones oversees 74 stores in Division II, which includes locations in the southern and western U.S. Jones' background includes stints with Home Depot, Eagle Hardware & Garden and Levy's Lumber and Building Centers.
Hechinger veteran Mike King is responsible for the remaining 74 stores located in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia and some Midwestern states, making up Division III. A beefed-up management team isn't all that's buoying Schwartz's spirits. He is also encouraged by 'significant sales increases' in the Tidewater area of Virginia and in Austin, Texas, where Hechinger recently completed full store remodels. The store makeovers are another facet of Hechinger's broader campaign to reverse its downward slide. The company plans to adopt the Home Quarters Warehouse name for majority of its stores, do partial resets chain wide by the end of this month and fully retrofit 47 stores by March. In addition to Tidewater and Austin, all stores in San Antonio, Texas, Detroit and Chicago will get full retrofits. Most of the stores getting complete overhauls are Builders Square units. "The Builders Square name just stinks," Schwartz said. "Ask anybody -- customers, suppliers, whoever. No one was happy with how Builders Square did business." Hechinger's market research made it clear that HQ was the company's strongest retail identity and the one that needed the least reinventing, thus the decision to remodel a majority of the stores into the HQ format. In mid-November, the company announced three more Builders Square closings, all in south Florida. The stores in Miami, Sunrise and Coral Springs will close after February, affecting more than 220 employees and bringing the company's store count down to 241. In what the company calls a "retailing experiment," the Builders Square unit in Hollywood, Fla., earlier this month was converted into a clearance center selling discontinued items, older models and out-of-season merchandise. One element of the chain wide retrofits is the introduction of new categories -- flooring, appliances, pet supplies and automotive -- which Schwartz said are all "performing as well as the company expected," although he did not provide specific figures. Not surprisingly, the new categories present a new set of challenges for Hechinger, some relating to the fact that the company has no sales history to dictate what and how much to buy. "All you can do is establish projections," said Macak. When questioned about the wisdom of going head-to-head with established appliance destinations like Circuit City, Best Buy and even Lowe's, Schwartz said that minimum advertised price standards in the category mitigate against price wars. |