Globetrotter shakes up the retail world

James Tupper has 30 years' experience of developing people and business performance in the food and grocery industry across Europe, Asia and Africa. He joined IGD in 2002 after returning from the tea plantations where he used to work, James told me at one of his speaker engagements in Brussels.

It felt like I had chased James around the world before pinning him down to talk this time. Running workshops for the Australian Woolworth’s chain of supermarkets – an antipodean Tesco – and in Canada for Wal-Mart, he was exercising the role in which he is now expert: bringing trading partners together and leading change programmes ‘to align processes and minimise reworking, escalation, fire-fighting and issue resolution costs’, as per his job description.

Through the process, supply chains are tooled up to resolve or, better still, avoid ‘unintended consequences’ of packaging decision-making.

A current programme in the UK is looking at the relationship between poor product identification in back of store and the level of waste that is created, specifically in the frozen foods, health & beauty and household categories, which regularly pick up ‘the wooden spoon’ for poor on-shelf availability in the regular ECR UK Availability survey, says James.

Trading cases that are difficult to distinguish cause problems especially where there is SKU density, he explains. The meaning of outer box coding will often get lost in translation, and the result is that night fillers in stores simply abandon product.

“The reward for suppliers with good product marking is that their goods do not languish in backrooms and end up in ‘reduced to clear’ bins,” says James.

A separate programme is making inroads into measuring and avoiding food packaging and waste by sharing best practice along the retail and foodservice supply chains. By bringing together the biggest names, the Tupper team with participants can ‘isolate best practice and celebrate success’.

“The benefits of packaging are not widely recognised: they are not sung about loudly enough,” says the man who helped prepare the well-received 2009 ECR Europe Packaging and Sustainability industry guidance document.

For five years this enthusiastic communicator has been taking packaging professionals into stores for a first-time, first-hand experience of replenishing shelves, to assess how packaging designs actually function in use. The most recent, for Wal-Mart Canada, brought major packaging supplier companies into a Toronto store.

Colleagues from different disciplines should ‘challenge’ design specification and ‘be assertive’ because they tend to work in separate ‘silos’, which are not aligned.

Back in the office north of London, James takes stock and distils the learning outcomes from workshop sessions and spreads the knowledge throughout the industry, via IGD's online information service platforms.

The happy globetrotter encourages others who must stay put to learn what’s going on in their world, by visiting the IGD Retail Analysis online compendium of over 50,000 photos of product shelf displays from around the world.

Studying the images reveals retailer strategies, which can help account managers, says James. “A good number of packaging suppliers already subscribe to the Supply Chain Analysis service. And more and more are engaging with customers’ customers, to get closer to where many packaging requirements originate.”

Keeping tabs on how delegates follow up workshops is important for measuring success, he thinks. Everyone leaves a session with ‘next steps’ to carry out and James wants to know how these feed through into business benefit, for example sales uplift or improved margins and profits. Their performance improvement is a sign of his own success as a programme designer and leader.

How does James manage to get the biggest players in the business on the same pitch aiming the ball into the same goal? The fact that IGD is now 100 years old inspires the industry to put its faith in it, he concludes, and this induces a sense of comfort and gives companies the confidence to instil new habits for the sake of more efficient, responsive supply chains.