Take back ‘Control’ of your retail consumables
Retailers spend huge amounts of time managing stock destined for customers yet often have limited structure in place around the consumables that keep stores running, such as till rolls, cleaning products, carrier bags and backroom supplies.
These items may represent a relatively small proportion of total spend individually, but across hundreds of stores they quickly become a significant operational cost.
The cost of standing still
This isn’t a new problem, but it’s a harder one to ignore than it used to be. Margins are under increasing pressure and at the same time, sustainability reporting is pushing waste and over-ordering into view in a way it wasn’t a few years ago. Consumables sit central to both these pressures yet remain one of the least scrutinised areas of spend in the business.
Local ordering habits, informal supplier relationships and store-level workarounds all get harder to unpick the longer they run which is part of why retailers who look at this now, rather than later, tend to find the change easier to make.
The challenge
Many retailers still experience:
- multiple suppliers
- inconsistent pricing
- local purchasing
- emergency ordering
- excess stock in some stores
- shortages in others
Without having overall control of your GNFR it becomes difficult to answer simple questions:
- What are we allowed to buy?
- Who’s authorised to buy it?
- Are we buying consistently across stores?
- Where are the gaps in the process?
The solution
Control starts here. It’s the first of the 7 Cs of Retail Consumables Management and the one the other six depend on. Before spend can be analysed or costs reduced, retailers first need the basics in place. Three things matter most:
- Approved product ranges, so every store is buying from the same standardised set.
- Clear ordering permissions, so it’s obvious who can authorise what and then maverick spend stops slipping through
- One governing process, replacing the patchwork of local habits and informal supplier relationships with a single, consistent approach.
What good looks like
Retailers with this discipline in place typically see the same pattern: consistent products across every store, fewer emergency purchases and clear accountability for who’s ordering what and why. None of this requires more complexity. It just requires the right ranges, permissions and process in place from the start.
That’s the foundation. As procurement consultant Chris Rigg put it on a recent Acopia retail industry panel: “Until you’ve baselined what it is you do there’s no point, you’re just compounding error on error.”
Once that baseline is there, retailers are in a position to go further, turning that same purchasing data into the visibility and reporting that drives real cost reduction.
Read the full article on gaining Control here
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Want a clearer picture of where your own consumables management baseline today? The Retail Consumables Maturity Index is a short, free assessment that benchmarks your operation across the 7C’s framework.
Take the Retail Consumables Maturity Index here
