Explore retail projects
Summarize
Summary of Explore retail projects
The Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite is a specialized extension of the Strategic Portfolio Management workspace designed to help retail organizations efficiently plan, execute, and monitor store life cycle projects. These projects include new store openings, closures, refurbishments, relocations, and technology refreshes. The suite consolidates project templates, retail-specific fields, and stage-gate playbooks into one unified interface, enabling consistent governance and streamlined workflows across multiple teams and locations.
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Key Features
- Standardized Project Templates: Users select a project type (e.g., New Store Opening, Store Closure) which automatically applies predefined templates with relevant tasks, milestones, dependencies, and durations tailored to each retail scenario.
- Retail-Specific Project Fields: Each project type includes custom fields capturing critical dates and milestones such as site approval, construction start, IT installation, and store go-live. This ensures structured tracking and consistent data capture across projects.
- Playbook-Guided Workflows: Stage-gate playbooks guide project managers through required stages, approvals, and validations from initiation to completion, ensuring consistent governance and process adherence regardless of project manager or location.
- Portfolio-Level Visibility: Since all projects of the same type share standardized fields and templates, executives can gain real-time, automated status updates and compare progress, identify risks, and generate reports without manual data consolidation.
- Life Cycle Scenarios Covered: The suite supports five main retail store life cycle scenarios—New Store Opening, Store Refurbishment, Store Closure, Store Relocation, and Technology Refresh—each with specific milestones and tailored templates managed within a single workspace.
Key Outcomes
- Consistent Project Structure and Reporting: Uniform templates and milestone tracking eliminate variability in project plans and enable leadership to have comparable, reliable data across all store projects.
- Improved Coordination and Automation: Cross-functional teams such as real estate, construction, IT, procurement, and finance are aligned through connected workflows, reducing manual coordination and delays.
- Enhanced Executive Oversight: Real-time portfolio visibility allows leadership to monitor timelines, budgets, and progress across hundreds of store projects, facilitating better decision-making and risk management.
Next Steps for ServiceNow Customers
ServiceNow customers can explore detailed guidance on configuring and using the Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite, including how to implement playbooks and tailor the suite to their unique retail store operations. This enables organizations to adopt a structured, scalable approach to managing complex retail projects on the ServiceNow platform.
Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite enables retail organizations to plan, execute, and track store life cycle projects such as new store openings, closures, refurbishments, relocations, and technology refreshes.
Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite overview
Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite is a purpose-built extension of the Strategic Portfolio Management workspace that gives retail organizations a structured, repeatable way to manage store life cycle projects. It brings together project templates, retail-specific project fields, and stage-gate playbooks into a single interface. By consolidating project planning, milestone tracking, and portfolio visibility, the suite means you don't have to coordinate across disconnected tools or spreadsheets. You can select a project type, apply a predefined template, capture key dates, and guide your team through each stage from initiation to completion. Playbooks verify that every store project follows a consistent governance process regardless of the project manager or store location.
Retail projects in Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite are structured, template-driven work items that guide teams through store life cycle scenarios.
The Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite works as an extension to the existing SPM capabilities such as project templates, project fields, playbooks, and workflows to tailor them specifically for retail store operations giving all the personas a connected experience on one platform.
- No standardization across projects: Every project manager builds their own project plan, task lists, and approval checkpoints. Store #412 might open with a 47-task plan and store #413 with a 62-task plan, created by different project managers. There is no consistency when reporting progress and updates to leadership because every project is structured differently.
- Manual coordination across teams: a single new store opening touches verticals such as real estate, construction, IT deployment, procurement, compliance, store operations, marketing, HR, and finance. Project managers handle
this manually through emails and significant human effort, with no automation or connected workflow.
For example: If the IT team doesn't get notified that construction is complete, POS installation sits idle for weeks.
- No visibility at the portfolio level: executives need to know how all store projects are progressing against timeline, budget, and completion targets. Without a common data model (shared fields, shared milestones, shared project types), rolling up status, comparing progress, or spotting risks across the portfolio is difficult.
Common project structure for every store scenario
When starting a new project, users select a project type such as New Store Opening or Store Closure. That selection filters the project to a set of predefined project templates containing the right tasks, milestones, dependencies, and durations for that specific scenario. Every new store opening starts from the same foundation. Every closure follows the same sequence.
For example, a New Store Opening template comes preloaded with tasks organized across phases like initiation, design and permitting, procurement, site readiness, construction, IT setup, fixtures, and go-live.
Retail-specific project fields that enable structured tracking
Each project type consists of custom fields to the project record that capture the key dates and milestones specific to that scenario. These project fields capture meaningful data points.
- For a New Store Opening, you get fields such as Site approval date, Construction start date, IT installation date, and Store go-live date.
- For a Store Closure, you get fields such as Closure decision date, Last trading day, Asset recovery completion date, and Closure confirmation date.
- For a Technology Refresh, you get fields such as Refresh approval date, Installation scheduled date, Installation completion date, and Store handover date.
These fields serve two purposes: they give project managers a clear dashboard of where the project stands at key inflection points, and they give leadership a set of consistent, comparable data points across every project of the same type. When every store closure captures a Last trading day in the same field, you can report on that across the entire portfolio.
Portfolio-level visibility across all store projects
Every project of a given type shares the same fields, templates, and milestones, enabling a consistent reporting layer. With the Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite offering, status updates are available automatically without manually gathering and organizing data from differently structured project plans.
Life-cycle scenarios offered with the retail suite
Each scenario has its own template, its own set of project fields, and its own guided playbook. These aren't five separate products; they're five configurations of the same underlying framework, all managed within the Workspace sharing the same reporting infrastructure and visible in a single portfolio view.
| Scenario | Offerings | Key milestones offered |
|---|---|---|
| New Store Opening | End-to-end from business case through grand opening and handover | Site approval date, Construction start date, IT installation date, Store go-live date |
| Store Refurbishment | Temporary shutdown, renovation, technology re-enablement, and reopening of an existing store | Refurbishment approval date, Decommissioning start date, Fit-out completion date, Re-opening date |
| Store Closure | Controlled wind-down from closure decision through asset recovery, decommissioning, and financial reconciliation | Closure decision date, Last trading day, Asset recovery completion date, Closure confirmation date |
| Store Relocation | Decommissioning the current store, preparing the new site, transferring operations | Relocation approval date, Current store closure date, New site readiness date, Relocation completion date |
| Technology Refresh | Replacing aging IT hardware (POS, routers, network) in an operational store | Refresh approval date, Installation scheduled date, Installation completion date, Store handover date |
Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite benefits
Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite provides benefits for retail project managers and their organizations.
- Standardized project structure for every store scenario: Retail Strategic Portfolio Management Suite provides predefined project templates for each store life cycle scenario.
- Milestone tracking for store scenarios: Each project type includes custom fields that capture the key dates and milestones specific to that scenario, such as site approval date, construction start date, IT installation date, and store go-live date. These fields give leadership a consistent, comparable set of data points across every project of the same type.
- Playbook-guided store life cycle: Stage-gate playbooks define the sequence of stages and activities that each store project must complete before advancing. Project managers are guided through required inputs, approvals, and validations at every stage, from initiation through handover.
- Portfolio-level visibility across all store projects: Because every project of a given type shares the same fields, templates, and milestones, status updates are available automatically. Executives can compare progress, identify risks, and report on the portfolio without manually gathering data from differently structured project plans.