The Challenge of Global Standardization
A global food and beverage company wanted to create alignment across its tens of thousands of storefronts to ensure consistency across store ownership models and elevate the customer experience. With thousands of store standards documents in use across its North American locations alone, frontline teams lacked a clear, concise, and universal standard for excellence. This overabundance of conflicting documentation created complexity in operations and risk to the customer experience and brand. Retail leaders engaged Point B to design enterprise-wide standards to simplify workflows and deliver consistency across employee and customer experiences.
The Path to Defining Operational Excellence
While simplicity is the goal, the path to get there is complex. Our food and beverage customer needed to take a global approach to defining and measuring operational excellence across their thousands of storefronts. Creating consistency meant answering questions like:
- What should in-store excellence look like, and how will we measure it?
- How might an enduring model for best-in-class operating standards take shape?
- How might we balance standardization with the need for customization based on variances across business units and geographies?
- Once developed, new operational and service standards would have to feel practical to frontline leaders and teams while connecting to the retailer’s mission and values.
Iterating Toward the Future State
The project team used an approach grounded in innovation and design principles to guide cross-functional teams and leaders through exploring broad possibilities for the future and iterating to uncover the highest potential solution.
Working alongside members of their global operations teams, we captured the current state by assessing existing documentation and defining a vision for their future state and impact.
Once aligned, we prototyped designs and tested each iteration with the support and feedback from 100+ participants across 20+ roles, from retail store operators to C-suite leaders. This rigorous and structured approach to continuous learning allowed our team to build stakeholder and executive confidence at every step, paving the way for the new Operational Standards needed to make the transformation a reality.
Project Outcomes
100+
participants involved in feedback and iteration
100K
frontline employees to gain clarity on global standards
100M
customers influenced weekly with more consistent service
Before the project began, our customer had countless store standards documents in use across its thousands of North American locations. Store operators lacked a single source of truth to be their guidepost.
This global food and beverage company was able to achieve:
- Alignment on a clear vision for the future state of globally relevant, measurable standards of operations and service excellence
- A tested and proven prototype and concept for the Operational Standards framework
- The identification of goals, tasks, interdependencies, and 6+ workstreams needed for implementation
- Future state clarity for 100,000+ frontline team members across global storefronts on standards of service excellence and how to achieve them
- More consistent service experiences impacting over 100 million customers weekly
Point B’s approach to operational excellence is customer-focused and employee-driven. We partner with retail leaders to create simple, clear, and scalable standards that enable growth across retail markets.
Get in touch with us here.
RELATED INDUSTRIES
RELATED SOLUTIONS
