The John Lewis Partnership (JLP) is one of the leading retailers in the United Kingdom (UK) and controls most of the industry’s market share. The company has two subsidiaries, John Lewis and Waitrose, that ensure the operations and strategic decisions the management makes take into account the environment for both companies. JLP relies on the concept of putting its employees at the forefront of the business and making sure they are the priority. It comprises about 78,000 employees who the company refers to as partners, and all the operations and decisions the company makes are in line with the needs and requirements of these partners (John Lewis Partnership, 2022). The company’s primary strategy for the next five years has been to move the business online and ensure the resources that will aid the company in its operations in the future.
JLP Resources
Transformed Resources
The operations that JLP offers in its retail capacity involve offering the best products to its customers and its services. JLP selling its goods provides the transformed resources of the company, such as the food products that Waitrose is involved with and the different appliances that John Lewis sells. Service operations involve the company contacting its customers and ensuring they get the best service from the workers (Barnes, 2018). The need to provide the best service by having the employees or partners of the business feeling satisfied and happy in their jobs is why JLP has a clear stance on the type of service it offers its customers. Therefore, the transformed resources in terms of the services JLP offers are the company’s customers.
Transforming Resources
Transforming resources is everything that a company utilizes as it aims to transform the inputs into outputs during the transformation process (Helmond & Samara, 2019). The transforming resources of JLP involve getting the products that it wants to get to market or the services it offers its customers and making them into outputs. The main transforming resource in the company is the staff members. JLP prides itself in how it treats its partners with the priority and respect that they get an added incentive to transform the service resources.
Outputs
The main output JLP’s operations produce are satisfied customers and increased sales for the company. In the event of sales, the company’s financial position points to a growing influence in the market. Over the last five years, the company’s revenue has steadily grown with the COVID market, the only time it has not increased its sales. In the first 2022 quarter, the company made a revenue of £10.8 billion, up 1% from the last financial year (John Lewis Partnership Annual Report, 2022). The customer reaction has also been higher for the company, showcasing it is achieving its target, but the move to online transactions aims to increase the output further. JLP has already suggested it will make investments worth £119 million in the shops and the digital activities, indicating the move to online business could make profits for the company (John Lewis Partnership, 2022). Investments in the digital front could showcase the company’s improvements as the digital move involves making life easier for its customers and improving customer service.
Importance of the Five Performance Objectives
The performance objectives of different firms involve ensuring the firm’s operations are in line with the goals of the operations strategy. Developing a strategy that could effectively ensure JLP makes the right improvements on its outputs of sales and improved customer satisfaction. To effectively measure the strategy’s performance, JLP needs to check the processes of value creation of the strategy, the strategy’s value delivery, and its value retention (Vegtar et al., 2020). JLP ensures it covers all the aspects of strategy as part of the overall impact that the five performance objectives will have on both the transformed and transforming resources. The five performance objectives that govern an operation’s success are speed, quality, flexibility, dependability, and cost. Firms need to operate in environments that enhance and give the conditions for the firm’s performance (Taouab & Issor, 2019). JLP pays close attention to the five performance objectives since the firm performance is tied to the performance of the operations it installs. The five performance objectives are an important part of any operation strategy. They allow the company implementing the strategy to understand its needs as it carries out the operation clearly.
The importance of the five performance objectives is clear for JLP and its partners. Operations of any company are measured using the performance objectives, which help the company make the right decisions in the market. The two concepts that determine the success of any operation are the correspondence and the coherence between the different levels of the business (Slack & Lewis, 2019). Striking a balance between these two will ensure companies like JLP can keep up with any changes in the market. The move to online shopping has forced companies like JLP to apply performance objectives to implement different strategies in the retail market. Innovation in the retail industry has seen practices that did not exist previously finding their way to market to effectively cover the issues customers face and present to the retailers. Innovative operations such as installing auto sorting of retail goods and introducing technological self-checkout stations for JLP have made increasing the output a viable goal for JLP (Brandschwei et al., 2018). JLP’s move to online businesses has coincided with the developments in technology in the environment around the company, making life easier for the consumers in the market.
The best model for JLP to understand the needs that the company has in connection with the operations strategy is the VRIO framework. The framework helps to help understand the transformed and transforming resources JLP uses as it applies different aspects of the strategy. The framework developed by Barney in the 1990s suggests that the resources of any company need to have Value, Rarity, Imitability, and Organization (Slack and Lewis, 2019). The framework helps explain the importance of the resources that JLP has and helps the company effectively put them as part of the transformation process in the retailing practice. The framework shows that operations in JLP are an important part of its strategy since its resources have the three characteristics and help ensure that the company considers the input it implements in its strategic decisions.
Product-Process Matrix
Industry 4.0 is the new trend in the operations market, with both processing and service companies relying on the technological advancements to make improvements to the services and products they offer (Kumar et al., 2020). The improvements in technology in the new industry has seen companies take advantage of how they implement the products and process aspects of their business. Understanding the relationship between the product and the process of any operation helps with to effectively cover the issues of what changes the company needs to make. The changing environment means that many of the processes and products that companies use during different operations are likely to only be used once by the company and it should ensure it has the right matrix to understand the relationship (Brunoe et al., 2019). The product-process matrix is therefore an important part of implementing and monitoring the operations of any management.
For JLP, the company has attempted to ensure it gives its partners as much of the information on the operations as possible. Since the company is one of the most employee-oriented companies, it is likely it has explained to its partners about the implications of the operations involving moving online. In most companies, the employees are not prioritized when implementing the technologies in the ‘Industry 4.0’ (Peruzzini et al., 2018). JLP’s priority of its partners has helped the company to overcome certain issues dealing with how the employees cover the concept of the new technologies.
Process Technology
Advancements in technology have allowed companies to access different parts of their operations and ensure they run smoothly. In the digital age, the use of technology for different processes in operation and to improve these processes has helped companies make significant progress. Process technology refers to a type of technology associated with applying the right changes to an organization’s operations to make them achieve its performance objectives. JLP is a modern company, and like many companies whose operations involve a lot of processes, the use of technology has become an important part of its business. Social media also has a big impact on the people’s decisions when making buying decisions, with a lot of people heavily influenced in the retail market (Nash, 2018). Operations from transforming the consumer’s perception about the company to improving the market reach of its goods have seen JLP gain the most important aspects as it tries to grow towards being the market leader. Process technology involves assimilating and sharing knowledge and continuous learning that allows companies to learn from new technologies to improve their overall strategy (Fang et al., 2016). Implementing process technology practices could help JLP gain the competitive advantage it is looking for in the market. Process technology could be an effective way to reach out to more customers and improve customer relations. The development of mobile applications, coupled with exchanging information over the internet, could help JLP achieve one of its service operations objectives.
Various environmental factors have pushed companies like JLP to adopt process technologies effectively. The COVID-19 pandemic hit the retail business hard as businesses had to shut down and companies had to lose their employees. Hundreds of thousands of UK retail jobs have been lost, and approximately £2 billion is lost daily due to the pandemic (Schleper et al., 2021). JLP, as a company, had to close down eight stores and let go of some of its employees’ values (John Lewis Partnership Annual Report, 2022). Technology was one of the ways that JLP attempted to maintain a position in the market above its competition by incorporating aspects such as home delivery for online sales, especially as the COVID pandemic increased how many people were going that route. The effect of the pandemic has also affected the personal contribution with the deaths and hospitalizations a feature of the pandemic (Sulaiman et al., 2020). The pandemic led to the mov Other than the pandemic, the move to a green and sustainable future has also made JLP shift towards sustainability projects. Sustainability in the retail market has been pushed by changes in the competitive market, customers who know about the modern processes, and tough regulations by the relevant bodies (Choudhary et al., 2019). JLP will need to look into sustainable process technology to keep up with its operations. Adopting the technology could help JLP reduce how it affects the environment through wastage and ensure it keeps with the operations geared towards sales improvement in the market (Fu et al., 2018). Technologies like recycling technology have helped companies like JLP move towards sustainability as that is the future.
Conclusion and Recommendations on Quality Improvement
JLP, as a leading company, has faced certain issues with the implementation of its operations, especially with its move to online services. The company has attempted to adopt different aspects of process technologies to improve quality, but customer service is the one aspect of its operations that it aims to improve. The recommendation for JLP would be to ensure it reaches out to its customers and starts rewarding its customers for shopping online. JLP has recently implemented a reward program for its cardholders called the Partnership Card that gives customers 1.5% back for purchases they make using the card (JLP, 2022). Implementing a similar concept for online buyers would help improve customer satisfaction and drive sales serving the two operations. JLP’s insistence on effectively covering the service and sales operations has helped it maintain its competitive advantage in a very competitive retail space.
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