Harding Retail

Helping Harding Retail’s labour requirements become ship-shape

As cruise ship retail experts, Harding Retail wanted to understand more about the labour requirements of their unique operation. They wanted to optimise efficiency whilst continuing to provide a premium service to all customers. ReThink was welcomed onboard to help provide a solution.

What was the challenge?

While rich in operational experience, Harding Retail lacked hard evidence to help them understand the challenges and opportunities of their on-ship teams. Rather than continuing to simply float along, it wanted a more scientific, data-driven approach. They wanted to make evidence-based decisions. This would help control their cost lines, and understand how to optimise their capacity to drive sales without additional resource – something that cannot easily be changed when at sea.

Unlike high street shoppers, Harding Retail’s customers have plenty of leisure time whilst at sea. The challenge was to improve their retail experience, giving them more time with the sales team onboard, and translate that into sales.

Making these positive changes would support their business development efforts by;

Securing partnerships: By understanding capacity, controlling costs, and consistently delivering sales targets, its cruise partner relationships are strengthened. The more data-driven and scientific they are in their approach, the more confidence this creates with cruise partners
Retaining colleagues: By understanding its resource profile and requirements, it is able to maintain good employee retention levels. With colleagues recruited across the globe and working on six-month contracts, Harding Retail wants to retain its status as an employer of choice, by providing a good work culture and environment, ensuring colleagues come back after their contracts have ended
Increasing sales: Customer behavior is different to that seen on-shore. The time onboard means customers spend much longer in shops and build a rapport with the retail teams. Making the most of this time is essential to increasing sales, so it’s key that the onboard team remain engaged with the customers

Harding Retail approached our team of productivity experts to:

Obtain reliable and trustworthy data that could be used to build workload labour models
Benefit from the expertise of our specialists to translate findings into facts
Understand colleagues’ working activities whilst onboard
Work with a partner they could trust to relay the findings in a way that added value and credibility for the business

What did we do?

Cruise ship retail is a challenging operational environment. Stockroom lockers are many floors below the shops, often small and lockers can be difficult to work in.

As an example, guests are prohibited from drinking their own alcohol whilst onboard, so most alcohol orders are delivered to the passenger when they disembark. This involves a busy pick and pack process by employees. Customers then either collect their orders from a central point, or on some ships, the orders are delivered to cabins on the last morning. This means a lot of walking down long corridors.

Retail activity isn’t just limited to the shops; employees often run additional value-added events to try and drive sales across high-value items such as watches, jewellery and alcohol.

Onboard sales teams don’t have typical land-based shifts. Generally, if the ship is at sea, the stores are open, which can be all day on a sea day, or late into the evening once the ship has left a port after a day visit. They also have delivery days with tight time windows to load a week or two’s worth of stock before the ship sails.

With so many factors to consider, our analysts didn’t simply assume that something they’d seen in land-based retail would automatically be the same at sea. We brought an open-minded approach to the project.

Taking place over 70 study days and across eight ships, our productivity experts analysed a mixture of small and large ships (300-1500+ cabins) sailing various routes across Europe and North America.

We carried out:

One day of efficiency analysis per ship – this was a team-wide study that looked at customer numbers as well as what colleagues were doing
Role studies of the Retail Managers and Assistant Managers – this was a day-in-a-life study that shadowed the leadership roles through their shift
Activity studies where tasks are timed on multiple occasions across all the ships to create a robust, average time for the task. This supports workload and rota planning

In addition to capturing the high quality data that underpins the analysis, ReThink analysts report productivity opportunities they spot. The photographs and observations highlight opportunities that may be harder to surface from the data alone.

How did it help?

Through our analysis, we were able to:

Provide clarity on labour requirements: Our workload labour model expert, Karen, partnered with the Harding Retail team to provide a standards-driven labour model that calculates the workload by ship
Identify that certain ships had tight labour resources, whereas others were more flexible: We provided insights into the capacity that was available onboard ships. The insight highlighted the priority ships that require extra focus on colleague availability
Identify an opportunity to reduce admin for managers: Harding Retail wants their managers to spend time leading their teams and ensuring a consistently good customer experience. These insights showed they needed to explore ways to stop, simplify or centralise the admin work that was being pushed to their ships from head office. This means a cultural change across the organisation

The outcomes of our findings are being applied to ships to drive the top-line and they are being built into a programme of work that Harding Retail will use for the future, ensuring smooth sailing from here on.

Feedback from Harding Retail

“Sue, Simon and the team understand the retail market, and they have a lot of insight. Those nuggets about the way we work are just as powerful as the data itself, because they give you a picture of the way people are working, how fast they’re working and, crucially, why they’re working that way. When that ‘why’ comes back to us in a presentation, that automatically buys-in senior stakeholders. Having the data and the insights together is super powerful.” – Steve Young, Head of Productivity at Harding Retail

If you want to understand more about your business’ operations, speak to our productivity experts today and discover how we can help your business thrive.