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Partner Interview
Published July 29, 2024

Ocado Solutions: Customer Painpoints & Sales Process

Executive Bio

Former Chief Commercial Officer at Ocado Solutions

Interview Transcript

Disclaimer: This interview is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. In Practise is an independent publisher and all opinions expressed by guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of In Practise.

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Can I interrupt for a second? What exactly is the cutover point? If you were to make it on a relative basis, as opposed to just US dollars per hour, considering the varying prices of goods in different countries, what would it be as a percentage of sales? If a highly efficient in-store picker is doing 120 UPH and the fulfillment centers are doing 200, 250, and targeting 300, what's the cutover point where you can genuinely offer a substantial ROI to customers building these?

However, until groceries deliver themselves—meaning until the advent of self-driving vehicles and robots that can bring groceries to your kitchen and fridge—you will still be hindered by the cost of delivery labor. I remember doing the business case in one Nordic country. The Nordics have the highest cost of labor in Europe. The four Nordic countries have very high labor costs. We couldn't make the business case in that specific Nordic country because they were doing store pick with click and collect. At the time, their UPH for store pick was 90. We showed that with the CFC, we would massively increase UPH for fulfillment.

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If you take it up until the point at which the groceries in the trays are loaded into the vans for delivery or into the staging area for pickup by click and collect customers, before you get to that point, let's say the figure you just used, 90, might account for maybe 5% of revenues from picking labor or something like that. Of course, that's equivalent to the cost of the Ocado solution for a customer. So, is that the cutover point, that 5% of sales figure? Or are there dramatically different or more important things happening elsewhere in the equation, like inbound fulfillment? Sorry, is there anything else I should be thinking about here?

The channel shift where online grocery penetration would grow and people would shift all their purchases from physical stores to online never happened. The business cases and capacity requirements calculations were based on these assumptions of full channel shift and increased online grocery penetration.

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