Retail & Distribution

Retail & Distribution Sector

From listening to our retail and distribution clients, we understand that the sector is facing a wide range of challenges:

Continuing labour cost pressure due to planned rises in minimum wages.
Purchase price increases from exchange rate changes.
Improving the Customer Experience – Innovating products and services to meet consumer needs
Making money from omni-channel demand and delivery.
Attracting and retaining the best employees with high engagement.
Creating supply chain responsiveness at lowest cost.

How we can help

Continuous Improvement (Lean) capability development – improvement system & accredited learning that offsets currency and wage increases.
Fast flowing ‘Concept to consumer’ process that enhances your offer to customers with large to small innovations.
Call centre management – customer handling system that drive service innovation at lower cost
Re-configuring the value chains to suit omni-channel operations to find the new balance point between bricks and clicks.
Develop real ownership by staff at all level, maximising skill development and coaching to double the rate of improvement. Access to global recognition via Shingo awards.
Transform supplier relationships to maximise value adding collaboration and lower cost by optimising end to end supply chain to be waste free.

Argos case study

Toll Group case study

Musgrave

“S A Partners really helps us to engage our partners in owning Continuous Improvement as their approach and values closely align to those of the Partnership. The training and coaching was very professional and customised to our needs. The learning by doing method meant we were able to see process improvement almost immediately and embed CI into the day to day operation of the teams.”

David Lloyd, General Manager – Magna Park, John Lewis

“S A Partners have encouraged true cross functional working, pulled us out of our silo mentality and helped us realise the way in which we were working was not yielding the greatest return possible. ·We are all busy delivering, however S A Partners have helped us to identify waste, re-work and duplication that we have simply accepted historically due to routine and pressure. S A Partners have assimilated into the business and our culture very easily, and have built superb report with the teams around them – they are completely unbiased and are focused purely on total business benefit.”

Chris Poucher, Marketing Manager, B&Q

“We were really impressed at how quickly our CI coaches have managed to turn CI workshops into delivered improvements. S A Partners’ support in creating this change was flexible and engaging whilst being very results oriented – We recommend them as a partner in improvement.”

Andy Adcock, Managing Director, M&S Foods Division