PRACTICE · TRANSFORM
Operating model design: four hundred stores, one way of working.
Growth breaks operating models quietly. Structures stretch, decisions crawl, every region invents its own process. We design — and install — the model that lets your estate scale without losing control or speed.
The issue.
The symptoms arrive separately: approval chains that take weeks, head-office functions that have drifted from stores, area managers spanning too many sites to coach any of them, SOPs that exist on paper and nowhere else. The cause is single: an operating model the business outgrew.
What we do.
- Organisation design: structure, spans and layers, role clarity from board to shelf
- Decision-rights and governance mapping — who decides what, at what threshold; the work that cut approval steps 54% in a 400-store estate
- SOP architecture: authoring, approval and version control for the routines that run stores
- KPI cascade and performance management design — from board scorecard to store huddle
- Head-office-to-store interface: field structure, visit disciplines, communication rhythm
- Digital enablement of the model: workflow design in ERP, digital audits, real-time reporting
How we work.
- Diagnose — how decisions actually move today.
- Decide — the structure, thresholds and standards worth keeping.
- Deliver — workflows, SOPs and reporting rebuilt and rolled out.
- Embed — compliance visible daily, not discovered quarterly.
What changes.
Decisions move at the speed stores need, with control kept where risk actually sits. One standard replaces local habit — and compliance becomes visible daily.
PROVEN IN PRACTICE
As VP Operations Excellence of a 400+ store grocery group, our principal authored and approved 50+ SOPs and policies, redesigned approval workflows across four ERP domains, and rolled the operating standard to 419 stores in two months.
Common questions.
Is this a restructuring exercise?
Not primarily. Headcount is sometimes part of the answer; clarity, spans and decision rights almost always are.
How do you make SOPs actually stick?
Training, digital audit and a reporting line that makes compliance visible — the same triad we used at national scale.
Can you design for multi-format estates?
Yes — supermarket, express, forecourt and dark-store formats each get the model variant they need inside one governance frame.
Related: Grocery Retail Transformation · Supply Chain Optimisation · Insight: one standard, not four hundred habits
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