Pandemic highlights the importance of operational agility in grocery

David Mostovoy
Published On:
May 12, 2020

As the coronavirus pandemic began impacting businesses across the world, many grocery store operators found themselves suddenly faced with increased traffic, product shortages due to increased demand, constantly evolving local government restrictions, and employees wary of getting sick.

To address all of these challenges, operators have been working hard to quickly develop new procedures and guidelines to keep employees and customers safe and keep their stores running smoothly. But simply developing new procedures to accommodate social distancing or sanitation guidelines, for example, isn’t enough. Operators need to ensure that they are implementing quickly and correctly at all locations.

Moving forward, these new procedures and guidelines will become a central part of the operations, and with the situation continually changing, new needs will continue to arise. So grocery store operators are realizing that it won’t be enough to just get the coronavirus updates in place and move on. The operation as a whole must become more agile – better able to adapt and respond to changing local, state, national, and global conditions. That means being able to develop new processes, quickly communicate them to every store, and have the ability to verify every store’s compliance within hours.

And although being agile is especially critical during the coronavirus pandemic, it will also benefit grocery operators even once the urgent requirements from the coronavirus pandemic subside. 

Every aspect of a grocery store’s operation can benefit from agile execution. For example, when there’s a product recall, grocery store operators need to be able to ensure that the affected products are pulled from store shelves in a timely manner. Or when the marketing department releases a new promotion, they need to be able to verify that each store not only received the promotional materials, but also set them up correctly and on time for launch.

And stores need to be capable of implementing these time-sensitive priorities at any time. Taking days to execute a product recall can risk your customers being sold potentially dangerous products, and stores being late setting up a promotion can lose out on revenue.

Inevitably, technology will play a major role in operators achieving a step-function boost in operational agility. Operators are using Zenput’s platform to not only launch critical coronavirus-related updates, but to also communicate and ensure execution of critical areas like brand standards, food safety, marketing promotions, and more.

To learn how Zenput can help your organization become agile, visit or email us at [email protected]

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