Operational Improvement & Way-Forward Strategy for a Retail Cooperative Society

Client Situation

The client, based in Dubai, is a leading retail cooperative society, and is one of the leading market dominants of the United Arab Emirates. The company excels in the retail industry, having established 15 branches of their hypermarket spread over strategic areas in Dubai. The client was looking to conduct a strategy and operations diagnostic, in order to find areas of improvement.

Cedar’s Approach

The client had mandated Cedar to evaluate its strategy and operations, and develop a business plan and way-forward strategy. Cedar’s approach was as follows:

• Holistic evaluation of the business by reviewing internal documentation and databases, and performance of qualitative and quantitative interviews with the management team
• Assessment of strategic, financial, product & service, sales, client, process, organizational and IT performance data
• Collection and review of secondary data for a sector outlook and identification and evaluation of key competitors
• Primary meetings with crucial competitors and relevant stakeholders
• Integration and analysis of all collected inputs and formulation of a way-forward strategy
• Presentation of findings and recommendations to key management

Outcome

The key outcomes of this program were as follows:

• Identification of growth strategy themes of customer-centricity, data-driven planning, innovation, execution excellence, human capital orientation
• Identification of key recommendation areas across functions:
1. Finance: Revenue growth and land expansion
2. Customer & Product: Assortment planning, customer experience and private label
3. Process: Supply chain management and consumer behaviour analytics
4. HR: Succession planning, training, employee engagement, individual performance measures, recruitment and talent bank
5. Organization: Special projects, strategic planning and category management
6. IT: Software applications and inventory management
• Development of an initiative prioritization framework based on business criticality and implementation effort
• Identification of 18 crucial strategic initiatives across recommendation areas, such as:
1. Leveraging government relationships
2. Tailoring of offering to emerging segments
3. Roll out of speciality immersive experiences
4. Aggressive growth in private label market penetration
• Development of a top-line implementation plan for the 18 strategic initiatives with indicative timelines, determined by the prioritization framework