Supermarkets and innovation in retail processes?

 

The other day I was in the line at one of the billing counters at a supermarket,here in Bangalore when a lady interrupted the billing attendant to ask him where she would get tomato puree.The attendant in the midst of processing a long bill with 5-6 impatient customers waiting in line, pointed toward Timbuktu and the lady dutifully set out in search of Timbuktu.

I don’t think she had it easy because she soon made her return to the counter to lodge her second complaint with the attendant.The attendant looks around for help from his colleagues only to find none around.Like a good ambassador of his employers he leaves the counter to help the lady out.Meanwhile rumblings of discontent can be heard amongst impatient customers waiting to be billed.

An underwhelming shopping experience for both the lady and the waiting customers .But has anyone spared a thought for the attendant?The poor guy has to not only process long bills monotously and listen to grumbling customers but also tolerate the shitty feeling of knowing that someone else should have been helping the lady find her tomato puree.

It set me thinking as to how this situation could avoided in future.First, identifying the problem.There were two problems in that situation :

• the lady didn’t know where to find her stuff
• there weren’t any staff around the aisles to help her

The former,no matter how well-designed and cleverly stacked your store is,will always be a problem.You can only minimize it through clear labels, hanging signage and what not,but there will always be the first-time customer,the forgetful customer or the instruction-ignorant customer.It’s the latter which is a problem – invisible aisle attendants.What happens in India at least is that the aisle attendants often end up grouping in one corner to indulge in a conversation and some banter.As a result,if you want to enquire about the availability or location of a product you end up looking through almost 3-4 aisles which may still end in frustration.It is then that the lady would have gone to the billing counter.

So how do you counter the problem of  ”invisible aisle attendants”? Imagine a 6-aisle store marked A1,A2,A3… and so on.Imagine the same lady looking for the elusive tomato puree.However this time she can see a help-phone at an end of the aisle.She lifts up the phone and dials 9.The call is received by a ‘remote aisle attendant’ who is sitting in the store and has a rough merchandise layout of the store with him.He tells our lady that the tomato puree is in Aisle A3 and guides her further more – whether its on her left or right,etc.Our lady victoriously emerges with her tomato puree,doesn’t disturb her billing attendant,the billing attendant has one reason less to be pissed off with life,and the customers in the billing line go home faster.

Furthermore,the store doesn’t have to man the aisle with that many attendants anymore.Which means lesser man-hours and lesser expenses.A win-win for everyone involved! What say you?

Shai Agassi & Better Place-Part 2

Shai Agassi seems to be one hell of a design thinker.Why is that so?Check out Tim Brown’s article in the HBR on design thinking.Brown who is the CEO of IDEO begins the article with an example of design thinking at its best.He goes back in time to highlight the master design thinker that Thomas Edison was.

Writes Brown,“Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb and then wrapped an entire industry around it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.

Thus Edison’s genius lay in his ability to conceive of a fully developed marketplace, not simply a discrete device. He was able to envision how people would want to use what he made, and he engineered toward that insight. He wasn’t always prescient (he originally believed the phonograph would be used mainly as a business machine for recording and replaying dictation), but he invariably gave great consideration to users’ needs and preferences.

Edison’s approach was an early example of what is now called “design thinking”—a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos.”

Agassi seems to be following in Edison’s footsteps.He saw value only if he recreated the entire electric automotive ecosystem.A fully conceived marketplace,not just a discrete device.

Let’s hope he’s as successful as Edison.

Shai Agassi & Better Place – Part 1

What a bloody idea!

Hats off to Shai Agassi and his venture called Better Place.This is what “thinking big” truly means.Business through betterment.Agassi,ex-SAP employee who is now a serial entrepreneur sees an opportunity in reducing dependence on oil through the use of electric cars.Big deal.He’s not the first person to.Moreover, the electric car hasn’t really taken off in a big way because of it’s fair share of problems,the biggest being batteries.

Car batteries, then and now, are heavy and expensive, don’t last long, and take forever to recharge. In five minutes you can fill a car with enough gas to go 300 miles, but five minutes of charging at home gets you only about 8 miles in an electric car. Clever tricks, like adding “range extenders”—gas engines that kick in when a battery dies—end up making the cars too expensive.

So what does Agassi think of? He creates an entirely new automotive ecosystem called ERGO.Cars in partnership with Nissan,recharge stations,recharge models inspired by the prepaid mobile and more.For starters he plans to circumvent the problem of batteries by separating ownership of the car and the battery.So the consumer just buys and owns the car,not the batteries.The batteries will be owned by ERGO – Electric Recharge Grid Operator which will set up hundreds of recharge spots across the country where drivers can plug in anywhere,anytime and subscribe to various ‘ electricity(miles) prepaid plans’.So get the car cheap, pay for the miles you travel and Better Place makes its money from the electricity(miles) that it sells! Whats more,the world is a greener place.Simply brilliant.

I would really be doing injustice to even try to explain it simply.So head to  this short and sweet interview by Fareed Zakaria,the Newsweek editor of the man himself.

Ladies & G,give it up for Shai Agassi.

For an even more detailed read,head to this article by Wired.