Market Perspectives

The annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Digital Leadership Awards showcase the professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that contribute significantly to improved efficiency, productivity and the performance of their organization. This prestigious award recognizes leaders and pioneers who have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across their people, processes, information and technology.

Ventana Research has awarded Theres Stefan at Migros Aare using Unit4 its prestigious 2021 Overall Digital Leadership Award. This is the most prestigious award offered as it is given to the individual, organization and technology provider that best exemplifies Overall Leadership. All award finalists in the areas of expertise — analytics, customer experience, data, digital business, digital technology, human capital management, marketing, office of finance, office of sales, and operations and supply chain — were considered for this award.

Ventana Research selected Migros Aare for the 14th Annual Overall Digital Leadership Award for its impact to the organization from the store to executive level, and the ability to gain the ROI and value that is essential for managing retail performance. Migros Aare uses the capabilities of Unit4 FP&A for sophisticated forecasting of revenues and personnel costs for all their stores to improve the in-store sales-to-FTE cost metric, create a predictive algorithm to support personnel cost planning and top-down/bottom-up forecasting.

Using a retail performance management system improves the accuracy of daily in-store forecasting and improves the annual budgeting process by providing high levels of interlinked forecasts for accuracy in sales and personnel costs. Migros Aare uses this technology in supermarkets and in its restaurants and specialty stores. For Migros Aare, people from all levels were involved at every step of solution implementation including financial controllers, store managers, regional sales managers and many others. This ensured the tool fulfilled all needs and was widely accepted within the organization.

With a better understanding of in-store profitability drivers, store managers can be more proactive. Seeing the real-time, dynamic link between staffing decisions and store margins, these managers are also more cost conscious. Now, daily demand is closely aligned with in-store FTE personnel needs, and the monthly sales-to-FTE cost deviation has reduced. The biggest challenge initially was convincing people that the new software would actually deliver what was promised (given the data input was correct). The biggest benefit was that the store managers, who are responsible for achieving their KPIs, had a reliable tool and success was measured by achieving a high level of forecast accuracy for personnel costs for the month following implementation.

Overall Digital Leadership spans all software categories in need of innovation and optimization. Unit4 addresses the challenges to enable retail performance management. Organizations with continuous planning and operations requirements will appreciate its flexibility to meet specific needs across the range of roles that need to work together.

Organizations looking to maximize the value of its business and technology investments across its people and processes should consider how to optimize its digital potential. If you have not examined how Unit4 can help your organization, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, Theres Stefan at Migros Aare, for your leadership.

Organizations can achieve significant innovation through the deployment and use of digital technology for business. Examining how to maximize your potential to increase the sophistication of your business areas of expertise like customer experience, finance, human capital management, marketing, sales and operations and supply chain is critical to assess and prioritize investments.

Ventana Research offers research-based guidance on embracing digital technology to increase the effectiveness of the workforce and engagement of customers. Change is required to maintain competitiveness and to enable business resilience and overall readiness to achieve the outcomes your organization deserves.