Business Scale and Integration Through Digital Investment
Problem
Following a series of acquisitions over several years, a food retail holding company owned multiple businesses operating on siloed and redundant technological landscapes. This meant the data insights and efficiencies that could come with scale and shared access could not be realized. The holding company needed help identifying a technology platform to integrate merchandising functions across their banners and gain access to the value of scale while sharing access to common data to drive further operational efficiencies.
Approach
Working closely with holding company and banner leadership, Excelerate first encouraged alignment of core business objectives and opportunities, ensuring all stakeholders understood the common goal and agreed on how to best engage across banners to promote cultural integration and provide transformation management and change support. Excelerate then conducted 30+ stakeholder interviews across functions and banners, drawing critical insights to identify opportunities, pain points, change management considerations, and to document the current landscape. From there, Excelerate worked with 50+ stakeholders to document current state processes, tools, and roles, before facilitating 10+ PAVA sessions. Through these sessions, Excelerate developed 20+ level 2 process maps across five banners, and ultimately a list of 300+ opportunities and pain points organized into an opportunity inventory.
Following this work, Excelerate next assembled a group of 30+ stakeholders for a multi-day, in-person workshop aimed at assessing which technologies and vendors could help unify the banners on a common technological plain. With input across each functional area, the extensive workshops concluded that a Merchandising Enterprise Resource Planning (merch-ERP) would help to achieve this goal. With a clear understanding of the future state needs, Excelerate helped develop a robust RFP for top performers in the Merch-ERP space. Excelerate then helped the internal teams evaluate the vendors, developing scorecards tailored to each of the 30+ evaluators’ expertise and integrating the results to form a complete picture of vendor capabilities and performance.
Results
With a clear, tangible, and defensible justification, Excelerate and the client team made the case for the leading vendor in a board-facing presentation. To bring clarity and reduce uncertainty, Excelerate also developed a robust seven-year total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis forecasting the required investment and maintenance for each vendor’s solution and then developed a comprehensive business case for investment in a new Merch-ERP platform by comparing the TCO analysis to the anticipated benefits of investment.
The client signed a contract with the suggested Merch-ERP vendor, and that vendor is now in the process of implementing the tool, integrating the client’s banners into a shared technological landscape.