Key Retailers and Brands Form the Retail Grocery Advisory Board
GS1 UK, the supply chain standards organisation, has facilitated the formation of the Retail Grocery Advisory Board with the objective of providing industry-wide solutions that will offer a better customer experience while delivering efficiencies throughout the supply chain. The Advisory Board includes members who represent almost 80% of the UK retail grocery market.
Members of the Advisory Board are ASDA, Boots, Coca Cola Enterprises, Co-op Group, Dairy Crest, Kellogg’s, Mondelēz International, Morrison’s, Müller UK & Ireland, Nestlé, Ocado, PepsiCo, P&G, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Unilever and Waitrose. They are committed to identifying areas where they can work collaboratively to address some of the challenges and pain points that the retail grocery sector faces today – such as changing shopper habits due to the rise of online and mobile shopping. They are focusing on how to unlock value in the end-to-end value chain that will ultimately deliver benefits both for the industry and the customer.
The Advisory Board is co-chaired by George Wright, Commercial Director for Strategy & Operations at Tesco Plc and Richard Sadler, Customer Director at Unilever UK & Ireland.
“I’m pleased to be part of the new Retail Grocery Advisory Board and I look forward to working with other retailers and brands to better understand and deal with the industry-wide issues we’re all facing today,” says George Wright. “Retail today is hugely complex and competitive, but our aim is to work together to find solutions that will bring greater efficiencies to the industry and also inspire the rest of the industry to collaborate further.”
Initially, the Advisory Board will focus on two projects – Digital DNA and Perfect Order:
* Digital DNA will address the industry-wide issue of data quality, with the aim to improve the customer experience in this increasingly digital age. In the last five years alone, industry analysis has shown that there is a £2 billion opportunity by improving data in the value chain to support product availability and sales.
* Perfect Order will focus on the order-to-cash process, establishing industry-wide harmonised processes for inbound logistics to drive efficiencies while removing avoidable costs.
Gary Lynch, CEO at GS1 UK, comments: “At GS1 UK, we’re proud to bring together so many retailers and brands from the retail grocery sector. This shows that industry collaboration in the right areas is more important than ever before. As an independent and neutral membership organisation, we’re able to facilitate and enable this collaboration to provide a strong foundation for effective retail operations.”
