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Interview with retail expert Peter Peels

Peter Peels, director retail at Scheepers Retail Group (Albert Heijn multi-franchise) and co-founder of Franchise-online, has years of experience in food retail. With professional and practical advice for healthy business growth, he successfully assists entrepreneurs in achieving their business objectives. Based on extensive knowledge and experience, he assists entrepreneurs in identifying and implementing possible growth opportunities for both the short and long term. Topics such as vision and strategy, organisation and management models, leadership, customer experience, employee satisfaction and labour cost management are of great importance. 

We talked to Peter about the role of workforce management in his work and the successes achieved at Scheepers Retail Groep. In an extensive interview, Peter talks about strategic challenges, trends and developments, movements within food retail, important opportunities and the business case behind targeted investments and making better choices.

Strategic challenges around staff availability and retention

"At present, supermarkets face a major challenge in attracting and retaining good staff. In addition, personnel expect more and more flexibility from the employer. This development will only get stronger in the future. To attract and retain good staff, you need to ensure job satisfaction and good (and modern) terms of employment.

If you want to be profitable and successful as a retailer, then it starts with your turnover. But the margin is always under pressure, because you cannot be too expensive. That is why you have to keep a close eye on operational costs. Apart from the fixed costs, these are loss of sales and labour costs. Labour costs are the largest cost item that can be influenced. It is therefore even more important to keep a grip on them. If you have a grip on your labour costs, you have a grip on your returns. Where you used to be able to work with your own Excel model, the more complex challenges of today mean that you really need good tools to be able to steer and especially adjust successfully.  

"Labor costs are the largest controllable cost item where you can make major improvements. So it only becomes more important to keep control on that. If you have control over your labor costs, you have control over your return.”

Process control and process improvement are also important challenges. If your processes are optimally tuned, the return is the highest. You must be able to control the processes by deploying the right people at the right time. However, you often see that too much energy is spent on the processes themselves and not enough on making employees better. It would be nice if you could focus more on the people themselves. This also has a positive effect on the bond with your employees. This in turn leads to positive PR on the labour market for new employees.

Another strategic challenge is communication with staff. Often, various means of communication are used, but this quickly leads to a loss of overview. Good communication is important for the motivation of the staff, so they know what is expected of them. It is therefore important to use a central communication channel in which all current information is shared at all levels. We are now achieving our first successes, for example, by using Microsoft Teams. In the future, I envisage that communication can take place via a central app for employees, such as the Job App."

"The most important thing is to make sure that people want to (continue to) work for you. A good WFM tool really helps with that. Especially if you can make the work more fun for employees."

Trends and developments in WFM

"There are of course many trends and developments going on, too many and complex to go through them all individually. That is why I want to highlight the most important and concrete ones.

In general, you see more and more that data is 'the key' to optimising your processes. It is therefore self-evident that data will also play an increasingly important role within workforce management. In the future, I envisage important insights based on the company's own data increasingly being presented directly , allowing you to make better decisions immediately. Then you will also be working and steering based on facts. The great thing about R&R is that it creates a link to the company database. You know when to pay a compliment and also when adjustments are needed. And especially: which buttons to turn in that case.

Another trend is that the work is becoming increasingly complex. This is also partly due to different systems and information being linked to each other. You can no longer make efficiency gains without the insights and possibilities that a good WFM tool offers. Every serious organisation invests in workforce management and eventually they can no longer do without it. A simple example is Sunday. A traditionally expensive day, because the labour costs are very high then due to the applicable surcharges. But a good WFM tool provides good insight into this. If you don't have a good tool, you don't have these insights and therefore you can't steer on them."

Development of WFM within Scheepers Retail Groep

"We started R&R WFM a little over a year ago within Scheepers Retail Groep. First of all, we took the mission, vision and core values of our organisation, so that everyone knows where we want to go as an organisation. The WFM tool then had to be in line with that.

In my opinion, that is where you really have to start. What are our customer promises and the culture values for our employees? How do we want to serve and retain our customers?' How do we help and inspire our customers to make their daily shopping choices?

Serving customers well includes offering a top-notch shop that is well cared for, but also well-trained staff who enjoy their work. If you have that under control, the customer feels at home in 'his or her' shop. Then, with the help of R&R, among other things, we started to manage staffing levels and wage costs. This helps enormously in keeping a grip on what you want to achieve, how you want to achieve it and what it may cost, in order to achieve a good return at the end of the line. It is always a question of finding the right balance between the desired performance of the shop and what it may cost to achieve a certain return at the end of the line.

R&R's workforce management tool provides us with important information to make better choices for the customer experience, employee satisfaction and the company's profitability. We have now been underway for some time and have already managed to achieve many excellent results. We really want employees to enjoy their work. We want to win together. That is one of the cultural values of our organisation."

"R&R's workforce management tool provides us with important information to make better choices for the customer experience, employee satisfaction and the company's bottom line."

Key achievements, results and milestones

"If you work in a focused way and use the system well, savings of 0.5% to 1% on labour costs can be achieved within a year. In addition, more grip on the operational processes quickly leads to a 20% improvement in productivity. We have achieved this simply by focusing on productivity and efficiency, without having to work harder or compromising shop performance. In short: by having the right, well-trained employee doing the right job at the right time at the right cost. The monitoring of progress by the management is, of course, also of great importance.

On an annual basis, this is a very significant saving, so the investment pays for itself quickly and amply. We are proud of the results achieved in this relatively short period. This is also a prelude to further improvements. We believe that there are still many opportunities for improvement.

Another important result that is more difficult to measure is peace in the organisation. Through clarity, smoothly running processes and greater efficiency. This is heavily underestimated. If there is peace and quiet, employees enjoy their work more and that affects everything. There are fewer fluctuations in the presentation of the shop, for example, because it all fits together better. Smooth-running processes and calm in the organisation make shop performance more stable and consistent.

"If you work in a targeted way and use the system properly, savings of 0.5% to 1% on labour costs can be achieved within a year. In addition, more grip on the operational processes quickly leads to a 20% improvement in productivity."

How R&R supported this

"As described, we have achieved good results with the correct use of the tool. What I also really like is that R&R really goes for long-term strategic collaboration and partnership. This is also reflected in the guidance and support provided by Stef van Dijk. You can tell that Stef has a lot of substantive knowledge of supermarkets and WFM from his background, and that inspires a lot of confidence.

In addition to the results achieved, the cooperation and also the aftercare were very good. I find this really distinctive compared to the competition. In addition, R&R's future-oriented and strategic thinking is an important strength. In the end it's the people who make the difference. There's a lot of personal attention and if there are problems, they are discussed quickly and pragmatically. That is why people remain loyal.

In addition, R&R's tool ensures that employees are more involved in the planning process. In addition to ease of use and central communication about rosters, employees can, for example, easily pass on their availability, swap shifts and view hours worked via the Job App on their mobile phone. This gives flexibility and more support to the employees."

Movements within food retail

"The food retail environment is always in a state of flux. At the moment, too, there are many developments going on, too many to deal with individually. Think of consolidation, technological developments, the emergence of new players, e-commerce and home and flash deliveries.

I try to look at this kind of trend from our role as 'brick-and-mortar supermarkets'. You just have to make sure that when the customer goes to the supermarket, it really matters and is worthwhile. That when the customer is in the shop, it feels good and everything is 'right'. That's in the whole experience in and around the shop, from easy parking to a clean shop and quick checkout. In short, the complete customer journey.

You need to have the right people working at the right time and in the right place. If we know, for example, that it is going to be very busy, we make sure that we schedule extra people who really add something to the customer experience. The combination of atmosphere, convenience and experience is distinctive and makes a shop visit worthwhile. We really believe in that.

Of course, there are trends and developments that are very relevant to us. For example, shops without a cash register, they will come. Enough successful tests have already been carried out. You can also see this in developments in our shops. There will soon be no more than one traditional cash register with a cashier, the rest will be self-scan. But here, too, you have to ensure that the experience is good and that questions and problems are dealt with.

It is also true that nobody is yet earning from e-commerce and home delivery. I am convinced that a healthy business model requires customers to pay for delivery. The question then is to what extent the customer is willing to do so.

The next steps and growth of Scheepers Retail Groep

"Scheepers Retail Groep has strong growth ambitions. For example, we are going to open our first shop in Belgium in the spring. Of course, this brings with it some major challenges. Think about the laws and regulations and cultural differences, for example. But we are very confident that we will make these steps successfully and that - with the help of R&R, among others - we will be able to implement continuous improvements. This should lead to further optimisation of productivity, without this being at the expense of our employees' job satisfaction and an excellent customer experience."

"We are very confident that we can continue to make improvements in order to further optimise productivity without compromising our employees' job satisfaction and excellent customer experience.

About Peter Peels

About Scheepers Retail Group

Stef van Dijk
About the author Stef van Dijk

Stef van Dijk has extensive experience in supermarkets and knows the food retail industry inside and out. Stef writes blogs on all relevant issues around workforce management and food retail.

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