Designing a process for Click + Collect service with minimal interaction between staff and customers

The challenges of COVID-19 pandemic in grocery shops

As a society, we have all been facing the challenges arisen from the COVID-19 pandemic as a whole. In the past 18 months, our social activities and shopping behaviours have been turned upside down.  We face the biggest challenge in grocery shops: Shortage of lorry drivers, disruptions in food supply chain, while ensuring that staff and customers are protected from the virus.

Here we are facing a new scenario. Imagine that you are an Operations Manager at local, large supermarket store. The analytics team has gathered some useful information for you regarding the behaviour of customers in the past six months. In the local area, 85% of household has at least one vehicle, and most of them drive to the supermarket store. If more customers use the Click + Collect service, it will help lower the pressure of shortage in your driving team (e.g. currently there is a shortage of delivery drivers). The radical changes your supermarket will make are to: 1. Focus on Click + Collect Service, 2. Provide more Incentive for the customers to adopt this service, 3. Reducing social contacts among staff and customers in the Click + Collect area. A primary benefit resulting from these changes is to allow you, as an operation manager, to better manage the demands for various products (i.e. customers usually place an order a few days before collection).

To better prepare for potential spike of Covid-19 cases in future, the senior management has asked you to make some changes to the Click & Collect experience. And, you need to take into account the precedented disruptions in supply of products.

• Supermarkets will need to introduce and adapt processes and procedures to minimise contagion risk in the Click + Collection point and possibly in other areas too;
• Customers are expected to behave responsibly assessing their own level of health risk prior to their visit;
• Measures should be introduced as far upstream as possible in the collection process;

To minimise risk of contagion in the Click & Collect sections

Ensure that orders are ready for collection (i.e. minimising customers’ waiting time)

The Goal is to maintain the local supply of food, beverages, other essential products and to do it under an environment where your staff and customers are protected.

The task for this assignment is to design a process, with the minimum amount of interactions between staff and Click & Collect customers, without compromising the quality of service. Although the vaccination roll-out is going well, you and your team are required to consider infectious diseases as a continuing threat. This is because if a staff member is tested positive, the other staff members who work closely with him or her need to be self-isolated for 10 days. The last thing that you want to happen is to be short of staff, which subsequently forces the supermarket to be closed.

The objective is to develop the processes of 1. Managing customers’ order from the warehouse, 2. Transferring the order(s) from the warehouse to the Click + Collect area, and 3. Customers arriving at the Click + Collect service point. The strategy for reducing the spread of infectious diseases is to, identify the disease, contain it close to the source.

The diagram below shows the broad steps from pre-arrival of customers and collection are to be the main focus and scope of your project. However, the handling of different order sizes and different demands may change part of your processes. The following diagrams give you some examples of different Click + Collection handling.

• Organisation plan with roles and responsibilities
• Reducing the number of touch points for the warehouse staff and delivery of products from your suppliers, and the staff at Click + Collect and customers
• Management of the automated touch point information (e.g. Customers’ orders)
• Scale of operations to cope with fluctuations in customer numbers (e.g. different hours across different days of a week)
• Potential stock-out of essential products (e.g. toilet roll, milk, vegetables, etc.). Use any of the TWO products as an example and develop the relevant sourcing strategies. The two products should be considered as essential items from the perspective of customers.
• Application of inventory management model(s) into your project

1. Explain the context and assumptions behind the application of business operations techniques
2. Recognise contemporary business operational issues an organisation
3. Research and analyse the practice of business operations within an organisation and present the findings of this research
4. Recommend ways business operations could be enhanced