Sharing Pools

Unconventional but proven ways to boost store profitability

A convenience store franchise chain had several different franchisees running the stores with a significant amount of autonomy, using their own workforce and labor management processes. The disparity that this situation brought across the network was causing strong inefficiencies, among them a permanent need to overstaff each site in order to cope with increasing absenteeism and turnover rates. Moreover, it also fueled a declining employee loyalty culture, poor staff productivity and performance, and, ultimately, poor customer service levels.

With mounting competition, both on the offer and the footprint, and with the customer expecting more, many retailers were starting to look for ways to enhance customer service through better organization and productivity.

The ambition

How to grasp the big opportunity on store performance and avoid falling short by just looking into incremental improvements in cost and process?

In other words, the ambition was to take advantage of the situation and look beyond efficiency to find a turning point in performance, one that would deliver new practices, new habits, and a new culture.

A new way of doing things, based on the principle of sharing central resources, to provide not only a significantly better, lean, and flexible store management platform, but also more integration with the brand to benefit both the end consumer and the franchisee.

Addressing it

The best practices in the shared services world provide a very useful transformation lever to turn over performance in different types of distributed environments, with this one being no exception.

In this case, an outsourced pool that combined technology, shared human resources, and flexible processes was arranged and operated as a platform to enhance value through store operations at site level. One that empowered all site personnel to create a more meaningful impact on the end consumer by providing automated proposals of task schedules, workload allocations, shift planning, and real-time measurements of customer demand and in-store activity.