Situation The situation of Mercat Sant Roc (MSR; Alcoy, Alicante) at the beginning of 2018, in terms of competitiveness, can be summarized in the following points:
§ A brand with minimal capacity to attract market sectors included in the 35-47 age range.
§ Board of Directors without a defined direction generates a lot of conflicts when making decisions.
§ General Assembly is very unwilling to accept the Board's proposals.
§ Absence of a management position responsible for executing the decisions of the governing bodies.
§ Sales practices on the part of the stalls - members of the General Assembly - are not very aligned with the expectations of the market sector they wish to attract (schedules, product management, interaction with customers, etc.).
§ Also, on the part of the stalls, there is a low acceptance of corporate processes that serve to present MSR's commercial activities coherently to the public.
§ Insufficiently defined business lines.
First Phase 2018-2019
Initial efforts focused on:
§ Define a concept -Educational Authenticity- that would serve as a pull factor for the type of customers to be attracted.
§ Define the first functionality - harmonization - to develop an added value for customers.
§ Appoint and train an executive management position.
§ Form technical teams so that the issues presented to the Board and the Assembly were well structured, with criteria based on data.
§ Develop the executive skills of the members of the Board of Directors so that the criteria used for decision-making were constructive with a positive vision.
§ Develop the professionalism of the stalls, especially in areas related to interacting with customers, product development, and management. In this sense, it is considered that if new practices lead to the progressive development of the business, stalls that are reluctant to change/evolve will be, at least, tolerant to the evolution that is needed.
§ Define the lines of business that are to be understood as the primary channels for attracting new customers. These lines are:
- Supermarket (Súper). Due to the capacity to deploy a sales model aligned with customer expectations, this line must be developed with the most excellent possible professionalism.
- Online Sales Portal. This line must offer the right product according to customers' needs and expectations.
The development of the two MSR business lines must consider the results of the corporate Perception Map —where customer expectations are managed— so that the efforts have a sufficient return.
Due to a general lack of statistical work, MSR brand acceptance among 35-47-year-old consumers had to be deduced by perception at the beginning.
By the end of 2019, it was achieved:
§ The concept -Educational Authenticity- has started to spread through the media, showing that it can become an attractor of new market sectors.
§ The harmonization functionality has been concretized at the specification level, even obtaining a first customer -Decathlon- of the derivative product -Cistella-.
§ The management position has been appointed -Onia Carpio- and its development was initiated through a leadership program (shared with other establishments in the city).
§ The necessary technical teams have been formed and have worked on their different responsibilities: concept, expectations, structure-stability. The information base generated has made it possible to present the proposals to the General Assembly to approve them in a positive dynamic.
§ The Board of Directors has worked directly - in the Board itself - and, in addition, in the development process of the stalls that, having a specific competitiveness program, are part of the Board. The Board's work dynamic has become positive/constructive.
§ The professionalism of the market stalls has been developed by setting an example with those who have decided to make an effort by deploying a specific competitiveness program.
Second Phase 2020
MSR's efforts to structure and develop the Cistella product and business lines are cut short by the nationwide lockdown resulting from the COVID pandemic.
This containment, which begins in mid-March 2020 and runs through the end of May, immediately affects the MSR of collapsing home delivery service during the first week of containment. Delivery volumes 3 to 4 times higher than usual become unmanageable due to the lack of an adequate IT structure, material resources, and clearly defined processes.
The first decision in this situation is not to close the service and devote all energies and resources to develop, in the shortest possible time, a team and a process capable of supporting the volume of home deliveries to be handled.
With the implementation of the new home delivery process - known as tuduc - it became evident from the number of calls from dissatisfied customers that the level of delivery failures was totally unacceptable. An average of 35% of failures in the last weeks of April and the first weeks of May generated an excessive level of dissatisfaction among customers using the service.
Once an operational team and process were structured, the next step was to work on the consistent reduction of failures. At the end of November, the result was a halving of failures (18%).
Table 1: Initial tuduc failure simple.
By the end of 2020, it was achieved:
§ Stabilize the work team and strengthening the tuduc process. In this regard, although misdelivering 18 times per 100 deliveries is still an excessive level of failure, the failures perceived by the end customer have been reduced much more markedly.
§ Initiate the development of the two lines of business -Super and Online Sales Portal-.
§ Increase the ratio of customers in the 35-47 age range by 120%. [1]
[1] The data presented correspond to those establishments that have made a specific effort to ensure the quality of the data managed.
It is necessary to maintain a constant focus on the reduction-elimination of failures in the home delivery service. Until an average of 5% (which would continue to be high) is achieved, this task must be prioritized in work schedules. In this regard, it is critical to ensure that attention is being paid to detecting and recording all failures that occur.
The main difficulty in reducing failures lies in need to unify the different stalls' work dynamics in the market, whose particular habits are deeply rooted. Generating a group vision is the key to the process.
Table 2: Tuduc failures by the end of November 2020.
