PRACTICE · TRANSFORM

Retail academies: make localisation a productivity gain, not a cost.

Saudisation is reshaping who works in your stores, what they cost and what they expect. Treated as a compliance exercise, it inflates your cost base. Treated as a capability programme, it raises productivity. We build the academies that decide which one you get.

The issue.

Localisation policy across the GCC — most forcefully in Saudi Arabia — is ending grocery’s traditional model of abundant, low-cost expatriate labour by design. Most operators respond by hiring to the quota and hoping. The result is predictable: higher wages against unchanged productivity, high early attrition, and store standards that slip because nobody was ever properly taught them. Meanwhile the same retailers wonder why their SOPs do not stick. The two problems are one problem — standards only survive in the hands of people who understand them.

What we do.

We design and build the training capability from a blank page — we have done it for a 12,000-person workforce.

How we work.

• Diagnose — where capability actually breaks: the routines not followed and why.
• Decide — the academy model, curriculum and business case your board can approve.
• Deliver — build it, launch it, train the first cohorts alongside your teams.
• Embed — your trainers, your faculty, your certification. We leave.

What changes.

Localisation stops being a line-item argument and starts being a productivity story. Standards hold because people were taught them properly. Attrition falls. And you own an institution that keeps producing capability long after the consultants have gone — which is, incidentally, exactly what Vision 2030 is asking of you.

Common questions.

Is this an HR project or an operations project?

Operations, with HR alongside. The purpose is not training for its own sake — it is store standards that hold and productivity that rises. We measure it on availability, compliance and labour productivity, not course completions.

Can it be built to support Saudisation targets specifically?

Yes — that is usually the point. We design role architecture and curricula so that as the workforce localises, capability and productivity go up rather than down. It turns a compliance cost into an operating advantage.

Do we need a physical academy?

Not necessarily. Blended and in-store delivery works for most estates; a physical centre earns its place at scale. We build the business case honestly, including the option of not building one.

Related: Operational Excellence & Store Standards · Operating Model Design