What does the future hold for retail?

The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects have led to more uncertainty and volatility for retailers. Pierre Mercier from Boston Consulting Group offered a presentation on the “Future of Retail,” which looked at several stats that promise lasting changes for online and offline sales channels. Many of these changes are projected to last after lockdown measures are lifted. Retailers must focus more on e-commerce and accelerating digitalization and automation.

On the planning and scheduling front, two themes stood out: the importance of improving the store delivery process, and workforce efficiency and engagement.

Planning and optimizing store deliveries is critical

Our customers Carrefour (Europe’s largest retailer) and X5 Retail Group (the largest Russian retailer) presented their learnings about the store delivery process. Their key insights:

1. Start reviewing delivery days at a tactical level, looking at frequency, delivery days, and master routes to balance the workload and create efficient routes.
2. At an operational level, create dynamic plans while respecting the agreed service levels with stores and balancing the workload at docks. By centralizing planning, deliveries from multiple DCs can be combined and resources can be exchanged. Use track & trace information to inform your stakeholders during the day.
3. The solutions provide the right functionality and optimizers, focused on this industry to grab the benefits. But don’t underestimate the change management, to obtain a continuously improving organization, to become more data driven.

Workforce planning for improved efficiency and engagement

S-Group, the largest Finnish retailer with over 40,000 employees and 19 brands also presented during the event. S-Group is using our cloud-native solutions for workforce scheduling, employee self-service and ad-hoc planning. With our tools, they have been able to avoid over- and under staffing. They have now a more accurate payroll calculation process, and have improved employee satisfaction. They pointed out that workforce efficiency and employee engagement are very important, especially as companies face the pandemic. Key learnings from their presentation include:

1. The 19 brands have a diverse business and process, which makes it a challenge to optimize.
2. Planning can be both centralized and decentralized, depending on size and location, there is no one size fits all.
3. If you have several labor agreements that need to be followed, an optimizer can be incredibly valuable to exchange personnel between departments.
4. Employee turnover is increasing, so planning needs to be agile and quick.
5. The demand for reporting and analytics is increasing, and both are necessary to continuously improve operations.

All in all, presentations and discussions confirmed that relying on optimization is more important than ever to face the challenges ahead.