Opening 500+ Stores Faster: How a Retail Major Cut Store Launch Timelines by 25% with Project Management Automation

In retail, every new store is a story. A story of scouting the right location, negotiating the lease, coordinating vendors, hiring staff, managing procurement, and aligning departments — all before the first customer even walks in.

At one of Asia’s most ambitious eyewear retail enterprises — generating over $700 million in annual revenue — this story repeated itself more than 500 times last year. But behind that impressive number was a silent war: against chaos, inefficiency, and time.

Because opening a single store required over 190 steps. And despite the team’s best efforts, each launch was taking nearly 120 days. That kind of delay doesn’t just hurt speed — it stings growth.

The Challenge: A Ticking Clock and Too Many Hands

Business Development was leading the charge. But the problem ran deeper than one team. HR, Procurement, Vendor Management, Lease Coordination, and Product Development — all were involved. And all were working with disconnected processes, manual tracking, and email chains that spanned departments and time zones.

The leadership team wasn’t looking for a tool. They were looking for transformation — the kind that could scale, simplify, and sustain.

The Transformation Engine: Retail Projct Management Automation at Scale

Enter our team.

Using the Kissflow platform, we helped design and roll out end-to-end project management and workflow automation, bringing every stakeholder, step, and metric onto a single dashboard.

We began with the most complex beast: new store opening. A whopping 190+ steps were broken down, mapped, and rebuilt into a fully digital workflow, cutting across:

• Vendor onboarding

• Lease management

• AOP planning

• Product development pipelines

• Cross-department approvals

Everything had a place. And every step could now be tracked in real time.

From 120 Days to 90 — and Beyond

With automation in place, the results followed quickly.

• 500+ store launches across India and international markets in a single fiscal year.

• A reduction in store opening time from 120 days to 90 — with a clear roadmap to shrink that further.

• Seamless coordination across HR, procurement, and product functions.

• A pipeline for AI-based dashboards, offering insights that once took days to compile.

What was once a bottleneck had become a launchpad.

An Operating System for Growth

But this wasn’t just about opening stores faster.

It was about building an operating system for growth. The kind where departments don’t just work together — they work in flow. The kind where business development doesn’t chase updates — they command visibility. And the kind where innovation doesn’t get buried in bureaucracy.

This is what project management transformation in retail looks like. Not just faster timelines — but better decisions, sharper accountability, and a culture of execution.