During the pandemic, Tesco embarked on a journey to achieve greater visibility into business processes to become more agile, resulting in the supermarket looking for a radical solution, as Daniel Peled, VP Global Strategic Sales, Nintex Kryon, explains.
Tesco chose Software AG’s ARIS to provide end-to-end visibility and management of the business. As a result, the business identified unforeseen blind spots within the organisation for the first time, which prompted the deployment of Nintex Kryon’s Process Discovery™ with task mining capabilities to detail the areas of efficiencies further.
The foresight from the business means it is better positioned to meet today’s challenges. According to new research from Inverto, the deepening crisis poses significant risks to the consumer goods and retail sectors. The situation could be severe enough to impact profits by as much as 10%, something the UK’s retail sector cannot afford after a tumultuous 24 months.
Additionally, the latest take-home grocery figures from Kantar show that supermarket sales fell by 6.3% over the 12 weeks to 20th March 2022.
Unsurprisingly, retailers are looking inward at their processes to build resilience and future proof their business.
What did this mean for the business?
The productivity challenge
Productivity has become a critical challenge for retailers as operating margins are expected to drop by 30% over the next ten years.
A core obstacle to achieving productivity was a lack of visibility into business operations and how it was running day-to-day from a management perspective. Despite hardworking staff, senior team members were unable to identify what business processes were working, improve productivity, and increase cost efficiencies without visibility.
Tesco leadership wanted to do something different – they needed more detail out of their process discovery tools, such as frequency, variations, time and motion of processes. The existing equipment failed to gather process information effectively, and the information it did collect exposed only a limited view of activity which felt inaccurate. To make a change, Tesco needed to address these structural concerns.
So how does a retail giant change course?
Gain new perspective and drive business performance
As part of Tesco’s drive to create a customer-focused business model, the company realised that it needed to understand its work processes better to create improved efficiencies that can trickle down to the customer.
This started with uncovering the business’s existing process knowledge and consolidating that into a central platform to simplify working practices.
With the new solutions, Tesco could capture and analyse end-to-end processes, while Nintex Kryon’s Process Discovery software provides insight into how people use applications. Software AG’s Enterprise Management System then consolidates this information, creating a unique process discovery and system management combination. These processes are housed on the platform to be used as information to onboard and train new employees, upskill existing staff and equip them with legacy knowledge. In addition, process caption and documentation tools improved delivery of services, sustainable implementations and furthered service consistency.
Unveiling process information from documents once hidden in the system to consolidate process knowledge supports the company’s focus on upskilling colleagues within the business.
Once consolidated and made accessible via the central Enterprise Management System, staff across the company can take ownership of the knowledge made available to them. At the same time, leaders can then use this information to identify opportunities for automation.
These tools supported Tesco in its customer-focused evolution, and the company’s intense vision helped create much-needed consistency within the business. In addition, the combination of Nintex Kryon Process Discovery™, and analytics underpinned by enterprise management, enabled the company to standardise and digitise its work processes.
It is worth noting that Tesco could not identify any process that could have benefitted from automation prior to the Nintex Kryon Process Discovery™ deployment. However, the outlook is markedly different today. The business now has the potential to be more agile and drive performance across various levels of the organisation.
These lessons from the pandemic remain critical for the sector even now. The ongoing inflation and supply chain issues will undoubtedly have doubled retailers’ bottom-line pressures. However, automation can play a significant role in helping businesses streamline their processes, drive efficiency, and deliver better customer service.
Under Tesco’s operating model and its revised business focus, the retailer has shown that it is now better positioned to deal with unforeseen disruptions in the future by uncovering new perspectives and actionable insights. And so can your business.
