Anyone who works in retail right now can tell you demand for omnichannel capabilities is surging. Whether curbside or delivery direct to the home, an increasing number of customers – especially those of Gen Z – are turning to shopping routines that do not involve going into a store. There is reason to believe retailers that master the omnichannel experience will be handsomely rewarded as referenced in a recent study by Cardlytics, which found that customers who engage in omnichannel behavior typically spend between 2 and 2.5 times more than regular customers. Unfortunately, many retailers lack the infrastructure to accommodate the increasing demand and are now facing a series of blistering pain points to integrate a fulfillment operation on top of their existing business.
Painful or not, the transition to omnichannel is here to stay. Consequently, developing efficient processes to meet demand is imperative and integral to growth. Many retailers want to embrace omnichannel, but without the ability to cool orders with perishables on the go and maintain cold chain they are being left behind. This is chiefly because modern cooling solutions – largely the same style used in retail aisles for the past century – lack several key components: mobility, modularity, scalability, connectedness, and sustainability. Answers to these problems do exist, however, and it is critical that retail leaders weigh the importance of deploying the appropriate solutions before they fall behind the curve. By contrast, those who do move quickly and carefully to adopt future-proof solutions stand to catch the wave and become leaders capable of guiding a shifting industry.
Many retailers have recently recognized the need to retrofit some portions of their fulfilment operation, but space has presented itself as a limiting factor. Initially, curbside delivery involved using backroom cooling solutions – reach-in refrigerators and freezers. Unfortunately, doing so often means carving out space that was already needed for hotly demanded products, or building out space. Either way, space constraints are a tangible impediment to growth.
Beyond the physical assets required to support omnichannel fulfillment, finding and retaining labor to address order demand has also presented a challenge. Turnover rates for order fulfillment positions have been reported as high as 130% across the industry. While this is staggeringly high, it’s little wonder if you consider what the average fulfillment job looks like using legacy cooling solutions.
Without using modern cooling solutions, the average order fulfillment follows these steps:
- A customer places an order online
- The employee pulls the order from shelves and coolers
- The employee brings the assembled order to the backroom
- Order is disassembled and placed back into coolers as necessary to maintain cold chain
- Upon the customer arrival, the employee reassembles the order once again and
- The employee delivers the order to the curb
It is easy to overlook in the face of necessity, but there is an enormous amount of wasted time and tedium in this process. Additionally, there is the potential for a great deal of physical strain placed upon employees as they repeatedly lug heavy and cumbersome products back and forth. What’s more, there can be much variability in the number of orders fulfilled daily, making meeting demand challenging. During high demand periods, retailers also run the risk of losing profits due to errors in order fulfillment.
There is also the matter of the customer’s patience to contend with. Complying with the industry standard of a 5-minute pickup experience is more difficult as demand increases. Some retailers have opted to address this by making use of pickup windows and assembling orders ahead of the customer’s arrival, but if the customer takes longer than anticipated to arrive this could result in the entire order falling out of cold chain compliance.
Mobile, modular solutions can be the key to solving all these problems, and these time and money saving solutions have already begun to be adopted by forward-thinking retailers. Rather than rely on bulky fridges and freezers in the backroom, retailers can utilize temperature-controlled electronic totes – some of which are equipped with connected services capable of accurately documenting cold chain compliance, sustainability metrics and more. These totes can be stored (and powered) on mobile carts or racks, reducing the required footprint by as much as 40 percent over legacy solutions.
Armed with these totes and carts, employees are freed from the additional task of assembling, breaking down and reassembling every order. Since the best totes are equipped with tri-temperature cooling and can cool to the specific temperature needs of the products in the order, the order only needs to be assembled once. No matter how long the customer takes to arrive, cold chain will never be broken – and once they do arrive, the employee just needs to unplug the cart and deliver the order curbside. This dramatically reduces delivery time, saves the grocer a costly retrofit, and results in an enormously improved experience for both the employee and the customer.
The advent of delivery is a modern opportunity that demands a modern solution. Regardless of how retailers feel about omnichannel, it is very unlikely to reverse – much like many other industry-altering trends that emerged during the pandemic. The new omnichannel focused era is here for retailers, and those able to quickly adapt their operations accordingly will find themselves poised to lead the next generation.
