OPERATIONS

In practical terms, we put insights in the hands of trading teams to better understand the commercial impacts of ranging, assortment, pricing and buying decisions, allowing you to truly blend the art and the science to achieve astounding results. Our supply chain specialists reinvent the networks of the best-loved retailers to meet the growing demands of today’s omni-channel customers. By combining deep operational expertise with innovative, digital solutions, we will help you deliver improved experiences, simply and profitably.​

Specialists in building modern order management capabilities which balance customer value, with delivery commitments and cost to serve; we help set you apart from your competition by ensuring your products are delivered quickly, accurately and efficiently, so that customers choose you.​

Having transformed some of the biggest supply chains in Europe, we are passionate about helping you manage stock optimally. By implementing data-driven solutions which sense demand, predict issues and make intelligent recommendations at the most granular level, we help you make more valuable decisions across channels and customer fulfilment points. ​

Our deep understanding of retail enables us to help transform our clients’ head office functions to get fit for an omni-channel world.  We help break down traditional silos and KPIs to get the organisation pointing in the same direction; entirely focused on customer-centricity and profitable growth. ​We have a comprehensive portfolio of business services to transform and, where appropriate, run your back-office operations.  We focus on re-engineering end-to-end processes for a digital world. Taking an ‘automation first’ approach, we enable you to focus on what you do best…the art of retailing.​ As retailers aim to reduce spend and generate cash for growth, we help take a more radical approach to cost optimisation across your business. By taking a cross-functional view and applying advanced analytics, we help you identify and systematically drive efficiency gains whilst helping to embed a continuous cost optimisation mindset across the organisation.

Develop Winning Products & Services

The pace of change continues to accelerate, driven by increasingly savvy and more demanding consumers as well as shortening product and trend life cycles, making it increasingly challenging for retailers to keep up. We believe integrating rich insights into the buying and merchandising process through digital solutions will create greater agility and increase responsiveness to customer needs and competitor activity. We help retailers put insights into the hands of their people so that they make informed decisions more quickly.

Create Customer-Centric Supply Networks

Customers today demand personalised services and rapid delivery, making supply networks a critical component of your customer experience and a means of competitive advantage. We believe winning supply networks should be predictive and responsive; be able to service different business models and customer segments; and balance speed and convenience with profitability. We help supply chain leaders transform their networks, structures and operations to continually rise to the challenge of customers’ expectations.

Optimise Business Operations

As retailers continue to focus on delivering value for their customers, they need to transform their business operations to support sustained, profitable growth. We believe that long-standing business challenges can be overcome by intelligent automation and robotics, helping you to unlock business value, increase agility and optimise costs. We help retailers reimagine their core processes, organisation and technology landscape for a digital world through our comprehensive portfolio of transformational services.

Examples of our work

Burberry:

Burberry needed an effective way to forecast demand for their new collections; which we delivered through “Naive Advisor”. We created an intuitive tool to provide merchandisers with searchable historic product catalogues and a natural network capable of predicting demand with 93% accuracy. A pioneering application of AI image analytics and deep learning models, has enabled Burberry to transform their buying process and develop more accurate forecasts. As the models learn, accuracy increases with each quarter to become the best forecasting tool in the industry.

Ocado:

Cambridge consultants is a subsidiary of the Capgemini Group focused on innovation in digital engineering. We worked with Ocado to develop arguably the most advanced grocery fulfilment centres in the world through the creation of the Ocado smart platform. The platform co-ordinates thousands of fast-moving robots, each a within a fraction of a second. This has been deployed to allow fully automated robots to assemble an average 50-item order in under 5 minutes. We adopted a on-team approach, working hand-on-glove with Ocado from concept through to delivery and ongoing support of the market-leading solution.

Matalan:

Matalan knew they needed to modernise their Merchandising capability but needed support to create their vision. We played a key role in shaping an industry-leading merchandising capability, using our Direction Setting methodology to align senior stakeholders around a clear vision and gain alignment on the supporting capabilities. This enabled the co-creation of a business case, transformation roadmap and engagement materials to excite and get ‘buy-in’ from the business.

Marks & Spencer:

As M&S’s strategic partner, we worked together to transform their allocation and replenishment processes across their global General Merchandise business. We balanced the complex business requirements of different channels, different operating models and a complex supply chain to ensure that industry leading demand forecasting and replenishment could deliver better availability for their customers, increased profitability and efficiency for their stakeholders and improve the business capability in this space.

Emerging Trends:

Choice Paradox:

• While customers expect to find exactly what they’re looking for , too much choice can result in decision paralysis.
• Retailers are responding by simplifying ranges, to focus on improved information and support to help trigger a purchasing decision.
• Subscription service that curates and ships products to customers is one of the methods of simplification gaining traction.