Safeway Stores UK
The Situation:
Safeway Stores in the late 1990’s was one of the ‘big four’ grocery retailers in the UK with sales of £8.3B, 480 stores nationwide and employs more than 92,000 people. At the time there was pretty much performance parity, with Safeway, Sainsbury, Tesco and Asda all getting 5% year on year growth. With the help of McKinsey consultants, Safeway set up a transformation programme with a BHAG to double performance to 10% YoY growth.
The Transformation:
After two months on board, fresh off the boat from little NZ, Melissa was selected to be part of the project to overhaul Safeway’s organisational model. She got to work intimately ‘in the field’ with McKinsey consultants in support, to design, test and deliver innovative new ways to lift the bottom line in 14 test stores. Given full license to overhaul things end to end, Melissa worked with a business analyst and supply chain colleague to commence Discovery Insight from analysing in-depth customer, UX, catchment, competitor and market insight. This then led to the resetting of bottom-up store sales and profit targets individually set for each store, based on market system and value chain volumetric analysis.
Once these goals were laid down, Melissa coached in the store teams to build up capability, and then commenced with helping the store teams design and execute in store innovations and localised marketing strategies, supported by her ‘Toolkit’ of tools and techniques to help strengthen team capability.
The Result:
10% YoY growth BHAG for the 14 test stores (vs 6% non-test stores), with the net result being the whole new organisational model and way of working was adopted across all of Safeway stores, in turn delivering 1M new customers. It was the 2nd best transformation project of Melissa’s career (after ecostore) where she learnt about design-led transformation, thinking and innovation before it was called as such.
