Strategic context
Agility is critical in the current economic climate, and your marketing, sales, service, and experience teams can no longer afford to work separately, or make inefficient use of their internal and external resources. ROI has never been more important.
The challenge
A leading international grocery retailer, faced rapidly escalating personnel and operational costs driven by inconsistent organisational structures and fragmented ways of working across its global footprint. Without a unified operating model, the business was incurring redundant roles, duplicated processes and unclear governance, threatening both service quality and margin targets. Our mission was to design and implement a lean, scalable global operating structure that would reduce headcount costs, streamline workflows and deliver sustainable savings.
Our approach
We began with extensive stakeholder engagement to baseline the current organisational state. This involved detailed data collection and stakeholder engagement sessions with Team Country Directors to thoroughly understand their unique team requirements and business contexts.
Our structured approach was comprehensive and phased, including:
- Developing a detailed current-state analysis, pinpointing inconsistencies and areas for improvement.
- Establishing clear design principles to guide the creation of the future operating model.
- Designing future-state organograms and determining right-sized FTE recommendations.
- Conducting rigorous validation sessions with heads of countries and key stakeholders to finalise organisational templates and role profiles.
- Formulating an activation strategy complete with high-level implementation roadmaps, governance processes, and a robust change management and communications plan.
To ensure effective execution, we produced detailed implementation and monitoring guides and provided insightful lessons learned reports to maintain continuous improvement.
The results
Through our collaborative efforts, we successfully delivered:
- An internationally standardised organisational template adopted by all major markets.
- Clearly defined departmental workflows aligned globally.
- Optimised FTE sizing to drive substantial personnel cost efficiencies.
- A strategic implementation roadmap set to fully realise cost benefits by January 2026.
- Significant cost reductions achieved through organisational shifts.
- Adoption of modern, low-cost communication and customer interaction channels.
This strategic transformation delivered substantial efficiency gains, resulting in savings of €22.1 million over five years. Our client now operates with a streamlined, scalable organisational structure capable of sustained operational and financial performance improvements.
