by Charlie Rapier | chief revenue officer, FMS Solutions
In my first months in this industry, I spent one morning with an independent grocer in the Northeast who had his business down cold.
He walked me through the store the way you walk through a house you built yourself. He knew his top 10 items by unit movement. He knew which cashier the older customers would wait in a longer line for. He knew to the penny what he had paid for ground beef that morning. So, I asked how the meat department had performed the week before. He thought for a second and said he would know in three or four weeks.
He was not embarrassed. And after a moment, I was not surprised; I recognized it. Not the store; the situation. I had seen this before, in four other industries, over 25 years with large corporations that struggled with similar issues.
Four times before
I have spent most of my career in enterprise technology: development platforms at Compuware, now part of BMC, shortly after Y2K; the business intelligence surge at MicroStrategy, now Strategy; Salesforce, where a new era of SaaS platform innovation emerged; and Delphix, now part of Perforce Software, where big data, automation and security became essential to meeting the data demands of the AI era.
The Fortune 500 customers we worked with faced the same challenge as the independent grocer – gaining insights and decision support faster. They needed to connect sales, financial, operational and labor data across operating units to run more efficiently and make better business decisions.
The pattern
It took me several years of going through implementation cycles in most industries to understand why adoption and execution were so poor across the largest and wealthiest companies.
The slowest adopters were always in industries with strong vertical expertise and defined processes. They had tenured employees combined with ironclad processes that were tested and proven over decades.
Much like grocery. The leaders tended to be those companies that knew how to leverage their people, processes and technology to solve specific problems.
As 2020 approached and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, businesses across most verticals began struggling with two things at once – getting the right data to the right people and losing experienced employees who were beginning to leave the workforce.
Which brings us here
When I joined FMS, I expected to find grocery operators who were not watching their numbers and lacked the technology platforms to gain insight, even if they were.
What I found was that many independents carry an enormous amount of complex business in their heads. Many know when something is off before any report can tell them but can’t quickly translate that to the team.
I found operations and buyers making major decisions and bets on information that was weeks old – not by preference. The speed of business changed after COVID. It doesn’t move in quarters and years anymore. The interconnected global economy moves in days and weeks.
Commodities rise and fall at the whim of geopolitical events. We live today in a connected digital economy where the same forces that move the cost of plastic also move the cost to get a head of lettuce to market.
What happens next
Technology combined with process will help improve vertical expertise for independent grocers. Intelligent automation coupled with AI managed by key partners or employees will allow the independent to be more competitive and focus on the customer.
Within a few years, what will separate independent operators will not be access to current numbers. The separation will come from who adopts the right process and technology and applies it to their people, regardless of tenure, so they can run their stores.
The profit leaders will reinvent their processes around data and automation. This will help the new generation become grocery literate faster. The numbers will be the easy part. Changing what you do on Monday will not be.