Ecommerce Operations

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Re-designed and implemented the product data standard and the operating model around it, across every product function and every EU market, enabling a cross-sell strategy for retail products, with benefits measured on delivery and forecast to generate several hundred million in revenue over three years. 

Multiplied value for the business and improved the customer and vendor experience.

The business had a significant growth opportunity, enabled by a cross-sell strategy for products across all EU markets. 

Operationally, though, products could only be created and set up market by market, because there was no common standard for what a product record had to contain. Requirements had accumulated over years, more than a hundred per product, with genuine legal, regulatory and compliance fields sitting alongside others that had been added to serve internal ways of working. No one could reliably say which were mandatory for a given product type in a given market, and no one owned the answer. 

Each market operated independently, and each product function had its own view of what it needed, so there was no forum in which the question could be settled.

This was a decision rights problem as much as an operational one, and it required the identification of, and partnership with, a large cross-region, cross-functional stakeholder base with few existing relationships between them. That base spanned legal, tax, trade and product safety compliance, retail and vendor management, master data and taxonomy, technology and data, supply chain and localisation, and the offshore shared service creating the records, in every market. 

Key steps included:

• Partnered with each regional retail senior leadership team to gain approval to size the opportunity, and to secure the budget and internal resourcing needed to mobilise the programme.
• Ran an as-is discovery, documenting and process-mapping how each market created products, and building a single view of the data requirements sitting behind it. Every individual field was documented, capturing why it existed, what it was used for and who owned it.
• Designed the end-state as a single product data standard, a common core for every market with conditional layers by market and product type, applied only where a genuine requirement existed. Every field was challenged with the regional operations, legal and compliance teams, so the standard was evidenced rather than imposed.
• Built the core standard with a single product function first, proving it before extending it function by function across every market, with variation allowed only where a requirement was genuinely different. Vendors were used to test the redesigned requirements before rollout.
• Defined and implemented a governance framework, with a named owner for every requirement and clear decision rights over the standard, reporting into the retail senior leadership team and including the compliance and legal teams.
• Defined the approach, built the plan and gained leadership approval for the budget and resources to execute.
• Led the solution design and implementation across every product function and every market, building and leading the programme team. The standard was recommended into each market by its own retail and vendor management leadership rather than mandated from the centre, which is what made adoption hold.
• Tested the results on delivery and measured the benefits realised, which is how the value was quantified and the revenue forecast built.
• Put controls in place to stop the standard drifting back, combining a change framework with named ownership and evidence required for anything new, validation built into the creation tools wherever technology allowed, and ongoing reporting to identify drift early.

Implemented the new operating model and data standard across every product function and every EU market, enabling the cross-sell strategy for retail products.

Multiplied value for the organisation by delivering multiple automation solutions identified during design, which the standardised data model made possible. This drove an 80% reduction in the time taken for a vendor to list a product, accelerating availability and unblocking product selection for customers, a core strategic goal of the business.

It also gave the business an evidenced position, for the first time, on what each market genuinely required, with a named owner for every requirement and a change framework governing anything added afterwards. The speed was the visible benefit, the control was the one that lasted.