Retail & Distribution: moving faster without degrading the stability of operations.
In retail and distribution, the constraint combines volume, seasonality and scattered sites. Teams have to speed up delivery and absorb the peaks without degrading service availability, the quality of support or the experience of users in stores, warehouses and head office.
Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner since 2008 · French consultancy · Paris and Lyon
Three constraints that keep coming up in retail.
Repetitive requests multiply with the number of sites. Every simplified journey, automation or self-service improvement therefore has an effect at scale.
Some periods concentrate a large share of the load. The setup has to absorb the peak without keeping oversized capacity in place all year.
A store, a warehouse and a head office do not share the same hours, the same equipment or the same level of autonomy. The service has to be shared without becoming uniform.
A setup sized for the annual average will not take the peak load; sized for the peak, it costs money the rest of the year.
The indicators we track.
Indicators depend on the process and the context. For a service desk, we typically track resolution time, first contact resolution, satisfaction, the volume of requests avoided through self-service, requests lingering in the backlog and actual portal usage.
The right goal is not only to handle things faster. It is to avoid needless requests and keep people for the cases that genuinely need them.
We would rather have a page with no logo than a name published without written agreement.
Our engagements in retail are not covered by publication permission: no named reference on this page. BleuLemon, a French consultancy (Paris, Lyon), Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner since 2008.
Frequently asked questions
A question that finds no answer here is dealt with in a thirty-minute conversation, about your actual context rather than a general case.
Talk to an expertHow do you absorb a seasonal peak without extra headcount?
By working upstream on request routing, self-service, knowledge and automation. Extra people can then be kept for the genuinely complex situations.
Do you need a different service catalogue for each site?
No. You need a shared foundation with journeys, forms, permissions and service levels adapted to the different populations and types of site.
Which indicators do you use to measure improvement?
They depend on the context: MTTR, FCR, CSAT, requests lingering in the backlog, share of requests through the portal, use of the knowledge base or automation rate. We start from your actual indicators, not a generic target.
Why do you name no client on this page?
Three detailed case studies are published on this site: Safran, Opteven and Viamedis. Our other engagements stay confidential or appear under a generic title, at the client's request. We would rather have a page with no logo than a page with a name published without written agreement.
Going further: IT service management (ITSM / ESM)·Adoption and change management·Support, application maintenance and managed services·The Assessment