special report | eCommerce As retail goes omnichannel, more vendors are filling online orders from stores. This has big implications for their backroom operations. The well-known supply chain consultant Jim Tompkins has an analogy for the typical retail store backroom. These backrooms, he says, look like many people’s garages, serving as an unorganized storage space, with items and boxes stuffed and precariously stacked in every odd corner. However, as more and more retailers experiment with fulfilling online orders from their brick-and-mortar stores, backrooms can no longer function this way. In a recent white paper, " Retail Backrooms: A Revolution in Roles and Business Value ," Tompkins’ consulting company, Tompkins International, argues that the backroom must evolve into a place for picking, packing, and possibly shipping orders. But accomplishing that will require greater organization, more attention to processes, and possibly automation. In short, backrooms will need to look less like a hoarder’s garage and more like a mini-distribution center. As these storerooms start to undergo this transformation, retailers will have to ask themselves the following key questions. 1. WHO OWNS THE BACKROOM? For a long time, the backroom has been the province of store operations or merchandising; logistics and warehousing folk typically had no visibility into what was taking place inside it. But as the backroom’s role expands to include more order fulfillment responsibilities, companies should re-evaluate whether that old organization model still makes sense. "What do merchants do well? Merchants understand the customer and how to sell product," says Tompkins. "What does the supply chain do well? Supply chains understand efficiency, product flow, and having reliable information. If the backroom needs to focus on the efficiency of product flow, then it makes sense for the supply chain to own it." Indeed, some leading players are already moving in this […]