Pro bono crisis support for essential retail and restaurant businesses.

Julian Mills, CEO Quorso
Julian Mills 04/03/2020·3 min read

In these unfathomable times, our thoughts are with friends, family, colleagues, and customers around the globe.

For businesses on the frontlines, who are operating at an extraordinary pace to provide essentials to their citizens, while coping with many of their own colleagues also being out sick – thank you for your service.

Even in “peacetime”, we appreciate that running large, multi-site businesses is incredibly hard work. Now we’re in crisis mode, that challenge has become more acute. And so I want to offer our help pro bono to see if we can reduce that pain, without any distraction to your core operations.

This note sets out exactly how we can support you during this crisis, by setting up, within a few weeks, a ‘Control Tower’ for your central Ops team.

 

Our offer.

Quorso 'Control Tower'
for COVID-19.

Running thousands of stores when (a) District Managers and others can’t travel freely, (b) some of your most experienced managers are out sick, (c) your workforce is changing, and (d) millions of citizens are depending on you for their basic survival (food, pharmacy items and other essentials), presents an unprecedented challenge.

The five most critical things right now, according to the grocery and convenience retailers we work, are:

  1. Alignment: Getting every store to shift their focus onto specific KPIs only (e.g., delivering labor hours).
  2. Early warning: Quickly recognizing what might be starting to go wrong (e.g., stock-outs), despite typical metrics having gone out the window.
  3. Visibility: Understanding whether (and how) your team are tackling those emerging issues.
  4. Coaching: Guiding and supporting Store Managers remotely on how best to tackle them.
  5. Efficiency: Providing 1-4 as efficiently as possible, so staff can free up time to replenish etc.

We are offering to set up a ‘Control Tower’ for frontline businesses to address #1-5. This will only take us a few weeks and, based on our experience with even the largest retailers, will require no more than two days from your Data Lead to create the feeds.

We can pull in any and all core store data that you deem most critical: e.g.,

  • Sales by day down to product-level.
  • Inventory KPIs, e.g., out-of-stocks, waste, and shrink by category and product.
  • Labor hours vs schedule and budget – plus employee satisfaction.
  • Customer satisfaction and other critical KPIs, e.g., conversion.

Uniquely, a Quorso ‘Control Tower’ enables your central Store Ops team and District Managers to collaborate virtually and remotely in a data-driven and efficient way to drive execution, performance and profitability across your store network. Specifically, the ‘Control Tower’ contains all the info to run your store network in one place:

  • Alerts the central Store Ops team to high priority emerging issues (e.g., labor shortages).
  • Enables Store Ops to seamlessly share these issues via email/social with relevant DMs.
  • Records the explanations and actions that DMs/Stores take.
  • Gathers data-backed, store-level intel on what is really happening on the ground.
  • Captures best practices that are working and scales them up.
  • (All in a simple, intuitive, time-saving application.)
In action already.

Here's how one of our convenience store clients is using the Quorso 'Control Tower'.

A. Realtime insights. KPI dashboard tailored to your needs.

Store Ops team tracks core business KPIs and is alerted to any drop-offs in performance (e.g. new POGs not trading as they should).

B. Issue drill downs. Granular visibility and understanding of emerging issues.

Store Ops team drills into KPIs to see which stores are underperforming where (e.g. East Thompson Lane hasn't deployed new 'Chips & Dips' POG).

C. Seamless sharing. Rapid remote co-ordination of efforts.

Store Ops team shares issue frictionlessly with District Manager for investigation (via email or integration with e.g. Teams/Slack).

D. Distributed learning. Best practices shared centrally so all stores can benefit.

District Manager explains what he/she found and how they have fixed the issue, so Store Ops teams across the business can all learn.

It will get better.

Once the Coronavirus epidemic abates, you will then have all your data, action tracking, measurement and best practice playbook in one platform – making you well positioned to capitalize quickly on the economic recovery.