The famous Little's law gives us the relationship between the number of customers in a facility N, the arrival rate lambda and the average time spent by customer at the service facility, T by the expression
N = lambda x T.
The arrival rate of customers lambda is an independent variable, outside our control, while the no. of customers inside the service facility N during this Covid time is decided by the government and health authorities depending on the shopfloor area.
The only variable under the control of the retail management is the time each customer spends at the retail outlet, T.
Given the random nature of customer arrivals, getting customers to maintain the same spend on products and services (merchandise) at the retail outlet while at the same time reducing the time spent at the facility and permitting only limited customers inside the facility to maintain social distancing norms is the challenge for retail outlets across the world, during this Covid time. The only variable within the control of the service outlet is the time spent by the customer inside the facility and the availability and variety of merchandise.
Taking the case of the outlet of a large major all- India retailer in Bangalore, a Design Thinking exercise was done to evaluate the options. The participants were a private group and after the initial empathy building exercises, the participants were asked to brainstorm on ways by which
1. the individual customer spend could be improved
2. reduce the time spent inside the retail facility.
Government regulations are presently in place where not more than 15 customers could be allowed in the said retail provision and veg/fruits facility at any time. The facility works in two shifts from 6 am to 2 pm and 2 pm to 10 pm and has about 6 staff in each shift. The staff man the counters and weighing centre, besides taking stock of inventory and arranging replenishment of depleted shelves. Replenishments come mostly in the morning.
Maintaining less human density (hence increased social distancing) inside the store while at the same time ensuring faster flow of customers though the facility, thereby spending less time at the facility and enabling more customers within the 12 hour open window of the store, is the only option for the store management to ensure it remains profitable even during this Covid time...
The many suggestions to improve customer spend and reduce customer time inside the service facility that came up during the brainstorming session of the Design Thinking exercise is given below.
1. make employees more customer responsive thereby offering more customer service
2. better visible arrangement of merchandise on the shelves
3. availability of large, comfortable, well maintained carts
4. better display of notifications and areas earmarked for specific items of merchandise
5. create more space for stocking items by reclaiming part of the frontage of the store
6. keep staple items at the rear and fast moving items prominently displayed at the counters at comfortable heights which ensures customers get a view of the stock and revise his/her purchase plan
7. increase check out counters so customers don't queue up at the exit
8. increase the warehouse heights so that extra items can be stocked, enabling faster replenishments when stocks get depleted
9. as far as possible ensure a uni-directional flow of customers within the premises to prevent customers intersecting others' paths
10. improve the indoor colour shades and aesthetics
11. classify vegetables and fruits in organic, healthy and economical (value for money) sections
12. pre-packing of fast moving staple items like potato, sugar, onions, tomatoes into convenient packages of 2 - 3 kgs each to enable faster movement of customers from staples area
13. exhibit posters requesting customers to ask or help in case they are unable to find particular items of merchandise
14. improve cubic utilisation of store shelves
15. smaller items could be placed in drawers attached to the racks than be placed in the open
16. maintain a fixed layout without much of change at least for 6 months so that repetitive customers can shop faster
17. keep dedicated staff at busy areas like vegetables, staple food item shopping area
18. make provisions for self-weighing and sticker generation by customers
19. more staffing at manual weighing counters
20. air conditioning to provide comfort to customers shopping
21. increase the alley space to reduce the feeling of congestion inside the store
22. a new metric rack ratio which is the ratio of storage floor space to total store floor space in the store is to be deployed to ensure effective utilisation of floor area.
23. have welcome staff at entrance and exit to guide and direct urgent customers to the racks and enable faster ckeckouts,
After these 23 suggestions have been generated, it is being discussed with the store management, who will take valuable suggestions and do a quick deployment on the shop floor. If this prototyping is found effective, it will be deployed not only at this store, but across the county.
The quality of the ideas generated at the brainstorming session was what added lot of value to this design thinking exercise.
This note has borrowed ideas from a Harvard Business Review article from Robert Schumsky and Lawrence Debo, What Safe Shopping Looks Like During The Pandemic, HBR, July '20 and the author acknowledges the authors of the HBR paper.
George..
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