Productivity Pulse Episode 5

Hear directly from our experts—Sue, Simon, & James —who share real-world trends, new data findings, and actionable productivity insights

We dig into stock to shelf benchmarking and reveal how much replenishment time is lost to movement and returns. We share early findings and details of our benchmarking report and Retail Technology Show plans

• Early look at our retail benchmarking report launch 
• Why benchmarking gives context beyond raw task times 
• The real cost of replenishment and movement waste 
• Impact of returning stock to backroom and double handling 
• Lean-inspired fixes: batching, pull signals, one-touch flow 
• Resource vs demand mismatches driving “keep busy” habits 
• Per-item cost insights and how to track them 

We will be at the Retail Technology Show the 22nd and 23rd of April at the Excel in London
We’ve got the VIP party in partnership with Solvedby.AI on the 22nd April. Register here... VIP Aftershow
Our Productivity Forum takes place on 10th September in Birmingham. Register here... ReThink Forum 2026

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to the Productivity Pulse. Sue and James join me again for another episode. Hi Sue. Hi James.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Hello. Hello, Simon.

Benchmark Report Sneak Peek

SPEAKER_01 0:14

So we're going to be talking today primarily Sue and James. I will chip in where I have something valuable, if I ever have anything valuable to say around some of our benchmarking, specifically stock to shelf, so some really interesting stuff there. But before we start, we've got a couple of bits of exciting news to share. I will hand over to Sue who will give you the first ever insights into our benchmarking report, which will go live just before the retail technology show, Sue.

Launch Dates And Event Details

SPEAKER_00 0:47

So we sit on a huge database of information that's been captured by our teams out of the bat in retail stores and lots of other organisations. And what we've done is mined that data to produce a kind of state of the nation of where retail's at. And on top of that, there's going to be six key aspects that are current challenges and give real insights as to what people can do about them. So we're excited to share those. Clearly, we're not giving away anything just yet. It's all still in development and uh being produced into a wonderful report. So that's launching on April the 21st, which is the day before the retail tech show. For people who want to get their hands on it, we're hoping there'll be some coverage in media and that sort of thing. You will be able to get it from our website. We'll be putting out posts. Or the other really good way is to come and say hello to us at the tech show on our stand, and they'll be able to get a copy, download, good copy there with us as well.

Why Benchmarking Matters

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Brilliant. So that's going live on the 21st of April. We'll at Retail Tech on the 22nd, 23rd of April. They sell in London. If you're a retailer, working in hospitality, etc., free to sign up. You just go to the Retail Technology Show website, get your pass. And we've also got plenty of people attending our VIP after party on the 22nd with our partners at Solved by AI. So there are some spaces left, some amazing guests come in. We're going to do a live podcast there, which will be interesting. So we'll get uh some of you on audio as well, asking questions. But yeah, that's the the 22nd with Solved by AI, and we'll put the link to sign up in the show notes. Data, data, data. So, James, you've been looking at some of our benchmarking data with one of our colleagues, Rushan. Do you want to give us a bit of an overview of some of the things you've been looking at and where that's led you to?

SPEAKER_02 2:49

Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to. Very excited about this. Sue, we've we've talked about benchmarking before. And when we run projects with our clients, we always like to give them a sense of how their results compare with other similar organizations and other organizations sometimes that aren't similar, so they can understand are they spending longer on tasks than other people? Um, are they spending more time on value adding or non-value adding activity and and so on? Like in your opinion, Sue, what does the benchmarking add to our client presentations when we when we present them?

SPEAKER_00 3:29

I think we can present a people with a a number of kind of how long something is taking. And if we work with them before, we'll be able to say how it's changed. I think it just gives that whole other edge to be able to say, and this is how you compare to your peers. So it's, you know, a number in a vacuum is can be interesting, and there's ways that you can use the data that we give to drill into it, to look at your process, to identify things that you could be doing differently and and opportunities for improvement. To know almost what's the archer possible where everybody else is sitting, just is is a whole dimension on that. That gives people kind of more of a push to do things or to make sure that they're staying ahead of everybody else too.

The Hidden Cost Of Replenishment

SPEAKER_02 4:13

That's it. And I think that that sense of not presenting numbers in a vacuum. We're we're all about context here, trying to provide oxygen to the to the data so that it can it can breathe and and live. And one of the things that Rosh Ann and I have have been working on is really trying to use the huge amount of benchmark data that we've collected over the years to provide some interesting stories. So, I mean, a conversation we've had frequently, and actually we had it last year at the retail tech show with um with a couple of partners as well, was how much do retailers spend on replenishment and on unnecessary activity on replenishment? Like we've we've always talked about how many times will a tin of beans be taken for a walk around the store before it goes on the shelf. But we've always found it difficult to find a way to kind of measure that. Is there anything kind of is there anything that that you've seen or you you'd like to add to that conversation? Like why are we interested in replenishment and and the cost of taking stock for a walk?

SPEAKER_01 5:16

To some degree, it's all that's left. So Sue touched on some of it, you know, tills have been automated, self-checkout, self-scan, uh, counters have been removed. If you think about most of the supermarkets outside of Waitros and Boo's and a bit of Morrison's, and then all your general retailers, the big bulk of any payroll cost left is stock, and it's something that's always been really tricky to dig into the cost of replenishment that's not one touch. Everybody wants to be one touch and gets there, but actually, what's the cost of trying to replen that tin of beans two times, three times, five times with a backdrop of national living wage moves to 1271 in April 2026, and he's only going to get more and more. So it's yeah, something I know we've talked about numerous different ways of how could we prove it out in a relatively controlled environment, but must be one of the biggest costs that exist in retailers at the moment.

Breaking Down Replenishment Tasks

Movement Waste And Variability

SPEAKER_02 6:17

Brilliant. Thank you. What we've been doing is trying to bring together these two thoughts. Like, how can we use our benchmark data to provide context to this challenge, which is, as you say, Simon, we think is one of the the kind of last large costs left in retail and potentially one that's that's quite quite hidden. There's a bit of a visibility gap when when it comes to these things. And we talked before can we get RFID tags put on um products and use gates to understand how many times they come in and out of the stock room and how much time they spend on the shop floor and so on. But actually, by doing some digging into our historic data, I think we've got a bit of a sense into the the amount of money that that might be being spent on unnecessary tasks here. Particularly looking, so it's early days, we're looking at replenishment in convenience retail at the moment, and we can obviously um generalize that later and do wider analysis. But what we started with was yeah, how how much time is spent on unnecessary stuff on replenishment in convenience retail. So first thing we've done here is something we we like to do when we're measuring tasks. So a lot of our clients ask us to measure how long tasks take, which obviously we're we're good at and happy to do, but we like to break those tasks down. So like recently we've been working with some different phone retailers, for example. We've been able to break down their processes into kind of how much time is spent selling a phone versus how much time is spent processing the transaction. That's quite valuable for those clients. We've taken a say a similar approach to replenishment here and broken the task down into what we think is core replenishment activity, what we think is non-core activity, and the time that they've spent moving around the store or walking in order to do that replenishment. And as I say, it's it's early days, but it's early days. On the analysis we've done so far, we found up to 20% of time on replenishment is spent moving around the store. Did that surprise you, Sue, when you saw that statistic?

SPEAKER_00 8:31

I think just the degree of variance surprised me. It probably shouldn't have done, given that I've seen the numbers and how much variability is, but there can be a lot of variance in stores. And it was it's interesting, you know, we see variability between different stores of different ways of doing things, but then to see that variability showing up at that level as well was was really interesting. And if you think, as Simon said, putting stock to shelves is one of the last big elements of work that people have to do. And if you can reduce it by 20% without spending any money by actually your teams doing things in a different slightly different way, then that's a massive opportunity for them to save costs and improve productivity.

SPEAKER_02 9:19

A huge opportunity. And like the proportion of time we observed on this task that was spent on what we what we deemed to be core replenishment activity was actually only 50 to 60 percent in the in the convenience retailers we've looked at so far. So actually it could be much bigger than 20% the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Yes. Um that sort of fits when we're looking at warehouses where they've got a peak operation, so they're walking around picking stock as opposed to putting stock on the shelf. We often see about 50% of time in a warehouse being kind of walking between spaces, which you know, in a big warehouse, perhaps understandable, there's things you can do to reduce that. So it's it gives you again a different context again for the amount of saving that there could be on those sorts of times when people are busy and using energy and they'll be shattered at the end of a shift because they've walked miles. It's kind of how many of those miles did they really have to walk to get that stock on the shell.

Stock For A Walk And Returns

SPEAKER_02 10:18

Absolutely. And then, you know, Simon talked about the the the living wage if you if you price up the cost of this movement versus how many items were actually put on shelf in the retailers we've looked at. Like we're looking at uh retailers spending over a penny per item put on the shelf just on walking around the store. Uh and you think about how many items you put on the uh on the shelf in your in your retail operation, that soon adds up into a huge amount of money spent just walking around. So not only is it good for the people and reducing the fatigue, but the amount of money that you could save if you could optimise that is potentially huge. And that's just looking at movement. Like so you've always used a a phrase that amused me, which is from your retail days. You used to see people taking cages of stock out onto the onto the shop floor, wandering around looking for for gaps and filling up a little bit and then taking the cage and a lot of the products back to back of back of house. And what what did you used to call that?

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Taking stock for a walk.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

Taking stock for a walk is good. Just you know, with a with a puppy in the house. I think about going for a walk all the all the time, but like taking stock for a walk seems like a big waste of of time. We've also looked at in these convenience retailers what proportion of um items they take onto the shop floor actually make it onto the shelf. And early days, as I as I said, but we're seeing up to a quarter of the items going back into the warehouse on on the task that we've looked at so far, which to me seems like, again, a large waste of resource and a potential opportunity to save a lot of money. So I mean, what do you have any thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Yeah, it's really interesting because when retailers receive their delivery, it's usually how much they get delivered and on what days is determined by a system or it's somebody else somewhere in the organization. So it's always really interesting for them to see how much of our stock goes direct to shelf and how much has to go to the back, knowing that anything that goes to the back has then got to be brought out again. But any time you're doing counts or gap checks or anything, the more stock you've got in the back, the longer it takes you and the uh harder work it is. So, you know, they haven't retailers at a shop level usually have no control over that. When it comes to things that they pick out of their um warehouse and take onto the shop floor, they've got all the control over that. So it's really interesting that you see where people are taking stock out, but then a portion of it doesn't fit. So, you know, they're obviously not doing it in a rigorous way where they've identified what they really need and what they and then just bring that. And I think a lot of it stems from the habit that happens in retailers to keep them busy. So, you know, there might be a quieter time where people just think, well, absolutely I'll just check and see if we've got one of those or there's a gap there, I'll go and see if I can fit that odd one or two products out. It's much better to wait to think about it from a customer perspective. I think as long as there's enough on the shelf for that customer to buy you really don't need to top it up. It's much better to do that as a batch process. But it it's this drive to keep busy and make sure as much is out as possible, I think that drives people to then bring loads of stuff out to see if they can fit on.

Root Causes And Practical Actions

SPEAKER_02 13:39

Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of manufacturing and uh you know delivering parts just in time as they're needed rather than having huge, huge stacks of them taking up space and and and and cash flow just kind of waiting, waiting for use. And obviously, you know, lean manufacturing and all Toyota TPS and all that kind of stuff. Those principles, if we could apply them to stock, there could be huge, huge benefits for for retailers there. So I mean, we're seeing again, if you if you take the the time that is spent on average in these convenience retailers on walking around and on taking access back to to the warehouse, we're talking about a couple of P being spent per item that's being put on the shelf, which you know is something that most retailers probably don't factor into their margins when they're when they're thinking about it, and is is a huge amount of money. As I've said a couple of times, it's it's early days on the analysis, so we'll report back when we've done a bit more. But from what we've discovered so far looking at this, you know, it's given us a sense of the scale of the of the of the problem. Do you have any any advice or any actions that somebody listening could take away that would be useful to them, other than of course measuring what's going on, because that'll help you understand the scale of it in your business and what the variability is like. But is there anything else that they could do today that might make a difference?

Next Steps And Final Reminders

SPEAKER_00 15:06

A lot of the cause of it is when there's a bit of a mismatch between the resource that's in the store versus the customer demand. And that has been exacerbated in some instances by, you know, if you've got lots of e-customers going through your self-checkout tools, do you need so many people? So there's lots of reasons why, you know, things have shifted a bit. So perhaps people haven't altered their resources to really match what what they need for to look after customers now and how their store operates now. Wherever there's this spare time, that becomes an encouragement to people to keep busy and find something to do. And that can be kind of one of the drivers. So there are some interesting root callers to this. So I think that's something to really think about.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

Yeah, so it's not a not a straightforward answer. It's about balancing the resource to the to the demand. That's fantastic, thank you. That was everything I wanted to talk about from this from this little bit of analysis we've been doing. It's been keeping us busy, and we're looking now at how we can generalize that out into other tasks. So in future episodes, I'll bring back some more results for us to discuss. But for now, um, Simon, back to you.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Thank you, James. Fantastic work. So keep listening future episodes, and James will reveal more about where we're getting to with the insights. Quick reminder about the benchmark reports you mentioned at the top of the pod. 21st, it's launch. Come and see us at the retail tech show in the Excel 22nd, 23rd of April, and we can get you a copy, we can discuss it more and be good to catch up. And don't forget to register for the VIP party on the 22nd with our friends at Sold by A. We'll pause there and thank you, James. Thank you, Sue.