Consumer businesses and the workforce shift

Key considerations to help reenvision and optimize business strategies

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To prepare for the future, today's consumer business executives must understand and respond to changing customer behavior and preferences. Having the right mix of talent in-house and outsourced is essential to providing customers with a superior digital and in-store experience. Focusing operations and systems investments to improve processes and, at a broader level, to implement both time- and labor-saving technology are critical to delivering your brand promise.

Efficiency improvement, business intelligence, automation and smart technology strategies can help retailers, restaurants, food manufacturers and other consumer businesses reenvision the workforce dynamic, directly affecting operations and growth. Shifting to these strategies can address today’s work challenges from warehouse to storefront, opening up tomorrow’s opportunities and profitability. Explore the following workforce shift key considerations for your business.

Key considerations for the challenges you face

Optimizing the online experience

The challenge: Improve the customer experience across channels with a leaner team of essential staff empowered by access to valuable data and information.

Key considerations:

Are you supporting a secure, premier customer experience from ordering to returns? If not, now is the perfect time to revisit your organization’s e-commerce strategy.
Define and establish brand identity, brand loyalty and incentive programs.
Utilize data to gain customer insight and create an engagement framework.
Optimize order processing engine to support store pickup and delivery cost-efficiently.
Comply with the payment card industry and data security standards.

Brick-and-mortar experience

The challenge: Improve the customer experience across channels with a leaner team of essential staff empowered by access to valuable data and information.

Key considerations:

Create a customer experience across channels (online to store) with a store-of--the-future approach.
Utilize data to understand customer behavior, then adjust products and layout accordingly.
Enhance and optimize delivery and pickup options, including curbside.
Enable staff through efficient point-of-sale systems, self-checkout and automated processes.
Utilize data to deploy store resources efficiently, supporting in-person needs.

Business-to-business strategies

The challenge: Improve the customer experience across channels with a leaner team of essential staff empowered by access to valuable data and information.

Key considerations:

Redefine technology strategy: Are you enabling the workforce to focus on the important aspects of the client experience and business (i.e., robotic process automation)?
Use real-time data and information availability, accelerating better decision-making.
Optimize and improve the efficiency of manually intensive work.
Create an environment focusing on safety, training and knowledge sharing.

Rethinking your back-office

The challenge: Recruit and retain high-level talent and keep supporting functions operating at peak performance.

Key considerations:

Optimize and engage talent and align organizational structures to address resource shortages and skill gaps.
Consider an end-to-end business platform supporting all functions to enable business intelligence and analytics tools.
Leverage financial planning and analysis.
Define an expansion or relocation strategy to support growth: the right resources in the right places.
Manage risk across your organization; secure access across systems, devices and teams.
Revisit incentive structures and fringe benefits to maximize retention and top talent recruitment.

Warehouse and distribution strategies

The challenge: Build flexibility into processes and operations to adapt quickly to macro events like supply chain disruptions, geopolitical issues and environmental concerns.

Key considerations:

Redefine your technology strategy: Are you streamlining processes and creating efficiencies, rationalization and optimization of invested capital?
Implement an end-to-end supply chain strategy, including all partners (supply, transportation, storage, etc.).
Install systems to provide real-time visibility into the supply chain: from demand planning to order fulfillment.
Use a business intelligence platform supporting ad hoc reporting to analyze changing environments in real time.

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