Background
O’Flynn Budgens is a family business, owned and run by Jamie and Colette O'Flynn. Recently they bought four Norfolk stores, in phased stages. This was made possible by a change to the Budgen business model after its acquisition in July 2002 by the Musgrave Group. Budgens stores (which numbered over 200 in the UK) could now be sold to local owners whilst Musgrave would act as wholesaler and distributor.
The four convenience stores are in central Norfolk, all within 10 miles of the City of Norwich. They are typically less than 10,000 square feet and pride themselves on their role in facilitating the needs of the local community. As the Budgens website points out “more out of town superstores have developed and high streets abandoned by many of the major multiples, Budgens has continued to offer customers the opportunity to open stores serving the local community”
In 2008, the O’Flynn Budgens store at Poringland, Norfolk, won the Convenience Retail Award for the use of technology. This case study describes the role of IT at the stores and the approach adopted for skills development.
Staffing at the stores
250 staff are employed at the four stores. About one third of these are cashiers; a store will have up to six check-out tills that are operated for two and a half shifts per day. The second largest category of staff are those stacking shelves, followed by those responsible for moving and transporting groceries and other products. In addition, there are managers and supervisors and a small number of back-office staff in each store. About 50% of the staff will work part-time. Store-based jobs are particularly attractive to those who wish to avoid the commute into nearby Norwich such as working mothers and college students.
O’Flynn Budgens realise the importance of their staff. They put considerable efforts into organising team events to ensure staff morale is high. They run quiz nights, barbecues, parties and support store football teams. They also pride themselves on the commitment to staff training - an HR/trainer is employed by the group. Each new joiner will spend an hour individually with the HR/trainer on their first day during which any training necessary will be identified and on-the-job training delivered. It is the role of the HR/trainer to check periodically on progress.
As a result, since the O’Flynn acquisition, staff turnover has dropped by 60%. All new starters undergo a probationary period of twelve weeks and at the end of that period they should be fully competent in their role. It is very unusual for someone to fail to acquire the necessary skills in this period and to part with the company. Colette O’Flynn, a former teacher and IT trainer, feels that most new entrants consequently have the required level of commitment and the basic skills to allow them to meet the needs of the job.
However, occasionally older workers may lack experience in some aspects of IT and some adults may have poor literacy skills, especially written communications. Provided there is willingness on the part of the employee, the communication skills needed for dealing with customers and colleagues can be developed through support from managers or a colleague designated as a buddy.
The role of IT
Far and away the most important system used at O’Flynn Budgens is Torex TM. This is described as an end-to-end business system for the extended retail marketplace. It is essential to store operation and runs the tills, bills, and back office. It not only adds the items and prints the bills when the cashiers input purchases, it also automatically reports the sales figures to the back office where these are consolidated and reports produced. One particularly useful function is that it can generate separate accounts reports for lottery and scratch cards.
Those responsible for managing and stacking shelves use an electronic ‘gun’. This scans in a barcode for each item (there are over 10,000 separate items in a store) and allows input of quantities. This data is also transferred through Torex TM to the back office and prompts reordering when stock is low which goes directly to the wholesaler Musgrave. There is an IT servers located at the Drayton store which is networked to the other sites. All employees need the IT skills to support the system.
In Colette O’Flynn’s view this is best achieved by individual one-to-one training. This she has delivered herself over an extended period. She was able to take advantage of the fact that the four stores were acquired some three months apart and phase the training accordingly. Her approach was to take each individual, assess their current starting-point (some older staff were less comfortable with IT than others), go through what they needed, and to spend appropriate training time with them and test their understanding at the end. She recognises this was resource-intensive in terms of her time, but in her words:
“One-to-one training is very direct and that’s exactly what is needed. In the context of a busy store it focuses us to concentrate on what is required and not waste time and energy on irrelevant activities.”