Reinventing Organizational Design for Growth within a Purchasing Department

 

Challenge

One of the first retailers to introduce a shopper loyalty card program recognized greater growth could be achieved through optimizing its Category Management function. As a large regional, full-service super market retailer, Category Business Planning was essential to its core, but modernization for improvement and efficiencies was needed. TPG was asked to help and identified growth opportunities through a reorganization of the Purchasing Department that would introduce Best Practices and support the company-wide deployment of Category Management. In addition, TPG uncovered the need to eliminate ineffective efforts currently being spent on “non-core” Category Management activities which would empower strategic focus, maximize consumer and category expertise levels, plus establish relevant and fair scorecard goals.

Discovery

We conducted a comprehensive analysis of the retailer’s organization, encompassing all work responsibility areas relevant to Category Management. Through the lens of consumer needs, we built a strategy to align category assignments, redefined job roles and responsibilities, and completed a workload analysis to reconfigure these category assignments. Developing performance measures within this function and supporting functions was critical to an improved organizational design engineered for sustainable growth.

Impact

In conclusion, new design was implemented in several departments with significant improvement in organizational productivity and company morale. The retailer has accelerated its completion timeline of category plans. In addition, it has achieved best-in-class Category Business Planning and continues to build upon this process as a new way of life within the organization.

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