Analysis And Reccomnedations To Improve Wegman’s Food Markets Operations
While taking an in-depth look at Wegman’s Food Markets Operations, they seem to be steam rolling right along. By providing a down to earth approach, treating their employees great with competitive salaries and incentives, and by delivering customer service that’s exceeds that of the average buyer’s expectations, there are still key items that could be addressed to be able to improve overall operations.
A recent article reported by www. eater. com, has provided information that Wegman’s have been hit hard with fines regarding safety violations. The safety violations brought to light by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). There were instances where the bakery in Wegman’s is said to have violated workplace safety rules multiple times that led to injuries that occurred to two employees. I decided to take a deeper look in to how to improve Wegman’s operations. I found customer complaints ranging from produce not being fresh to not having items in stock for customers to purchase. These complaints can stem about the need for improvement. The unsatisfactory array of the products that Wegman’s isn’t selling or have on hand is detrimental to sales. There is a need to reduce carrying costs of unnecessary spoilage to managing shelf life as well. Since the complaints are system wide, there needs to be a system in place to help Wegman’s manage, track and forecast their inventory to be able to provide and ensure that they have product on hand for the customer’s needs.
Since Wegmans is a ubiquitous store in nearly every town, their sales and costs would fluctuate depending on the market in the towns where the stores are, provided that customers are shopping there. A way the Wegmans could improve operations would be to achieve enterprise-wide cost control. Achieving enterprise wide cost control is a business process that streamlines departments in purchasing, productions, sales, cost management and human resources and accounting. Cost control is the practice of identifying and reducing business expenses to increase profits, and it starts with the budgeting process. A business owner compares actual results with the budgeted expectations, and if actual costs are higher than planned, management takes action.
Wegman’s also, to date only has 98 stores in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions, in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Virginia. For improving operations Wegman’s will need to increase their footprints in terms of competition into different states and markets. Compared to their competitors who have a larger array of stores like Publix with 1, 231 stores, Trader Joe’s at 474 and Whole Foods Markets at 479, Wegmans is only a fraction of its competitors. Expansion will ultimately improve operations by providing more stores to provide products and services to customers, so they may buy and invest in to the company. This not only helps sales but will be able to provide a change to develop brand loyalty. Once customers start shopping and Wegman’s earns customers trust, they will start to only shop there for their grocery needs. This will provide a change for customers to promote Wegmans to their family and friends as well.
Taking a look on the inside of sales as well as competitors pricing can be a great way to revitalize ways to improve operations. If prices and/or services are priced too high, then it’s likely that customers will go outside to competitors to get the product or service cheaper. Increasing the price can also be a tricky way to keep a steady business growing with the rate of inflation. Most business’ put off raising prices because they don’t want to run off or offend current loyal customers. A great way to avoid jumping the prices is to steadily increase the price a little at a time, to ease the customer into the rate of price change. Measuring performance and setting goals to meet certain wickets is a great way to improve operations. Having appropriate metrics to look at sales growth, market share, product quality, and customer retention rate will set you up to have a game plan to forecast and adjust operations to see what and how certain items need to be improved.
Diving into the SWOT analysis of Wegman’s, we can see their weakness’ is the range of food offered is limited compared to other supermarkets which limit the options available to consumers. The prices of items are higher than supermarkets and grocery stores which might limit the target group and lower brand awareness and less market share of the company. Lastly, improving operations can be optimized by creating ways to have buyers return to stores to shop. There are varieties of way to accurately ensure this. Steps taken like changing item locations to make products easier to find, use larger shopping carts to make a phycological trigger to try and get the customer to fulfil the need of filling the shopping cart up. Develop in store coupons to make the customer use the coupon and also look around to hopefully buy more items. Offering free samples also gives customers ways to try before they buy.
Overall, any step mentioned above will ensure a company’s growth by a fail proof plan provided to ensure that operations improve. Providing a great experience in line with demanded products will optimize operational processes.
