The speed and reliability of any retailer’s information technology is key to its ability to react to changing customer demands. This is particularly true in the grocery sector, where strong competition and thin margins make it essential to react rapidly or even proactively to hone customer experiences on those digital channels that are growing in popularity - all without putting impossible strain on supply chains or teams on the field.
Here’s how four grocery retailers have successfully overcome their omnichannel distribution challenges to boost e-commerce sales. By using levers such as stockout reduction, improved warehouse management, and digitized in-store execution of omnichannel orders, they have succeeded in improving customer experience and optimized their operations. .
Cora’s adoption of a new Order Management System (OMS) helping the company increase its online revenue by reducing stock shortages and product substitutions. The real-time view of the stock displayed on the e-commerce site manages customer expectations in a transparent way. Its hybrid inventory approach brought more flexibility to stock management and helped the company to improve rates of order fulfilment and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.
To maintain its reputation for excellent customer experiences while experiencing a rapid increase in ecommerce orders, Carrefour Spain moved away from legacy on-premises systems to a cloud-based subscription model. It achieved a much-needed increase in capacity and added flexibility to its order fulfilment process - reducing both processing times and operational costs - by adopting a new Warehouse Management System (WMS) adapted to its specific workflows and challenges. The outcome was an ability to successfully handle more orders with the same or even better quality of service as before.
Auchan embarked on a digital transformation project to transition to a new in-store picking system for omnichannel orders. Store zones were precisely mapped, enabling the creation of optimized routes and specific workflows for each type of order - such as Drive, Click & Collect, and quick commerce. The newly optimized picking process dramatically improved employee productivity in the form of reduced order preparation time, improving the customer experience and satisfaction.
Monoprix moved from a pen-and-paper process to a digital picking solution dedicated to such ‘quick commerce’ orders, developed specifically to prepare orders within the 40-minute window required by Uber Eats and Deliveroo,. The new technology made the process quicker and easier for pickers, reducing picking errors, increasing the number of perfect orders, and reducing operator training time.
These stories show how flexible, responsive technology can enable you to effect rapid operational changes that ensure you evolve and innovate to meet changing customer expectations.
While being key to optimizing existing processes and ensuring great customer experiences, SaaS solutions like OMS, WMS and picking applications can also be great foundations to experiment with new customer journey strategies in grocery distribution. Allowing you to test and learn from new workflows and journeys, these solutions are a great way to future-proof both your technology stack and your business.
Dive into the details to find out exactly how each project achieved its impressive results by downloading our ebook Tackling the challenges of omnichannel distribution.