Waitrose is a one of UK’s leading supermarket brands and is Britain’s largest employee owned retailer. By providing the ability to suggest new ideas for the business and allowing Partners to voice and collaborate on those, it allows the organisation to constantly strive to better operations, customer service and its impact on the communities it serves.
Partner Ideas is Waitrose's innovation scheme built on Wazoku’s Idea Spotlight, to collect, evaluate and manage all ideas and engagement from all employees.
Waitrose is consistently averaging 100 sign ups to the Partner Ideas platform per month
Submitted ideas on the platform have been delivered and implemented
One idea to reduce receipts by 12cm saves Waitrose £168k per year in till roll costs.
BACKGROUND: THE NEED FOR CHANGE
Collecting ideas for innovation has been going on at Waitrose for over 15 years. Although their previous method, the Waitrose Good Suggestion Scheme, was a great way to submit ideas, it had so many friction points and it was so unengaging, it rarely saw any ideas delivered.
Waitrose 3 key drivers for any innovation is that it must:
When evaluating the performance and friction points of the previous scheme, Waitrose noticed that:
It was admin heavy with only an inbox as visibility, that was invisible to the end user
No process was in place to move an idea through from evaluation to implementation
Heavy volume and email address being used for all stages made it hard to control or manage communication
It gave no visibility to the Partner that submitted the idea, as to what was happening
It had very little or no business wide engagement with the scheme, no successes to shout about, and as such getting buy in to deliver ideas was nearly impossible
An issue with processing and sharing duplicate ideas.
With this in mind Waitrose needed to understand:
The solution? The decision to entirely revamp Waitrose innovation scheme.
IDEAS SCHEME: PARTNER IDEAS - POWERED BY WAZOKU
Waitrose decided on Wazoku's idea management platform to amplify ideas, innovation and employee engagement with all Partners from head office to the shop floor, across all departments. Partner Ideas is the one single platform to engage all Partners and encourage new ideas, anytime, anywhere. Partner Ideas to ensure Waitrose as a business is constantly tasking itself to change and innovate and also putting their greatest asset (their people) at the heart of this process.
Waitrose mission statement is at the heart of their approach.
“Partner Ideas is an innovation platform, enabling our co-owners to suggest ways we can improve our Business by having conversations directly with process owners across the Partnership, working together to support our Business success”
#wearepartners
HOW IDEA SPOTLIGHT ADDRESSED BUSINESS CHALLENGES FOR WAITROSE
Engaging employees to submit ways to improve the business was not new to Waitrose, but leveraging the benefits of this is, and delivering them was hard to achieve successfully.
The platform addressed many of the issues we were currently facing including:
KEY SUCCESS FACTORS: COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION
Waitrose aimed to use a multitude of different ways to engage all business owners, stakeholders and end users. They did this through:
To aid ongoing communication outside of the scheme Waitrose uses regular publications such as:
A VALUE-DRIVEN INNOVATION PROGRAMME
The success of Waitrose Partner Ideas scheme is down to the ongoing commitment and communication across the entire business and most importantly within the senior leadership of the business. Idea development is not free, and therefore unlocking the capital needed to implement ideas is critical to the success of their ideas scheme.
To achieve this, Waitrose aligned business benefits (such as cost or time savings) that were uncovered through implemented ideas - and directly mapped these benefits to the budgets of directors that sponsored the idea. This approach diverted what was historically a small amount of capital from the annual budget to
deliver a much higher return on investment.
Waitrose Partner Ideas scheme has and continues to deliver clear value to the business year on year, resulting in a dynamic business that empowers Partner’s to have a voice and role in the whole innovation process.
“Small ideas are here to stay, and generally impact and mean so much more to Partners, than the next big strategic change. Therefore using a system that allows any Partner, working anywhere in our business, whether driving a van, restocking shelves or managing the marketing POS, to submit an idea is very important. Idea Spotlight gives exactly that.”
STUART EAMES, RETAIL INNOVATION LEAD, WAITROSE