Somerfield
The Capgemini ERS team helped Somerfield identify a number of potential future store initiatives, focused particularly around the customer experience and staff efficiency in the store.
The Somerfield Group, based in Bristol, England, incorporates the Somerfield and Kwik Save supermarket business units, which together operate nearly 1,300 stores throughout the UK with annual turnover of £5.1 billion. The company’s neighborhood supermarkets account for a 6.3% share of the UK grocery market.
The Challenge
Somerfield was working with Capgemini to explore a future store program and the various initiatives that might be incorporated into this strategy. To help the company gain greater visibility into the “art of the possible,” Capgemini recommended that Somerfield executives participate in an Extended Retail Solutions Insight Day.
Capgemini Approach
Extended Retail Solutions (ERS) is an innovative joint initiative from Capgemini, Intel, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft. ERS is designed to improve the consumer experience, store operations, and the supply chain through the use of technology and an open-standards approach, thereby helping to increase sales and lower the retailer’s total cost of ownership. The ERS initiative makes use of the collective experience, resources, and retail knowledge of four global business and technology leaders: Capgemini, Intel, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft. For the first time, these four companies have combined their respective strengths to deliver a technology framework for improvement tailored to the retail market.
The ERS Insight Day format provided Somerfield with the opportunity to begin its future store journey by engaging with retail and technology specialists from the four ERS companies. The ERS Insight Days are held in Capgemini’s unique Accelerated Solutions Environment and provide retailers with an opportunity to leverage the combined product roadmaps and retail and technology experience of Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft, which are put in a retail context by Capgemini. The unique interactive format allowed Somerfield to explore a variety of topics relevant to their company, view technology demos, and agree upon a clear set of initiatives for their organization.
Value Delivered
By the end of the Insight Day session, the ERS team had helped Somerfield identify a number of potential future store initiatives, focused particularly around the customer experience and staff efficiency in the store. This led to an eight-week follow-on project to examine these initiatives more closely, determine whether they would fit into the company’s architecture, and conduct a cost/benefit and business case assessment for each initiative.
The eight-week assessment that followed the ERS Insight Day allowed Somerfield to narrow down the list to five major initiatives. The company expects to do a mass rollout of these specific financially compelling solutions rather than taking a full-scale future store approach.
“At the end of the day, you realize that you’ve done an amazing amount of work - but it’s not just volume, it’s quality work because you have all this industry expertise in one place.”
Darrell Maton
Customer Relationship Executive, Somerfield