South African Retailer Partners with Daymon to Deliver on Omnichannel Strategy
Partnerships are a critical component of success in the retail business. It’s very challenging for one organization to do it all from the ground up—or at least to do it well. Working together, both partners can often achieve greater success.
That’s the idea that drove the latest expansion of Daymon’s partnership with one of the largest retailers in South Africa. Over the past 20 years, the retailer has partnered with Daymon on a number of services, including in-store merchandising, consumer experience marketing and private brand development. Together, the companies have evolved and expanded their services to meet consumers’ changing needs. So it seemed like a natural fit when the retailer came looking for help with its latest omnichannel initiatives.
“Our retailer partner approached us when they decided to transition from filling online grocery orders through individual stores to using a single fulfillment center,” explains Mike Decker, Senior Director of Operations and Online for Daymon’s South Africa division. The retailer had created a dedicated online warehouse in Cape Town to fulfill its Western Cape orders and was looking for a partner to handle the actual picking, quality checking and packing of the orders.
Decker and his team were quick to agree to help. “A big part of our success with our retailer partner has been our ability to work together to develop new solutions. We listen to what our customer needs and try to find solutions for them,” he says.
The program was working well, and the retailer planned to tap Daymon again last year to service a new fulfillment center it was opening in the inland region of South Africa. But then the retailer hit a major snag: the company delivering its orders to customers’ homes was bought out and its contract canceled.
Once again Pick n Pay turned to Daymon, insisting they were the right partner for the job. Despite the fact they had no experience running a delivery service, Decker and his team stepped up to the challenge.
In just six weeks, the Daymon South Africa team helped rebuild the retailer’s delivery program—developing standard operating procedures, hiring and training specially-licensed tuk-tuk (three-wheeled vehicle) drivers, and setting up hubs at individual stores to help facilitate deliveries.
“It was challenging,” says Johan Botha, Strategic Development Manager for Daymon. “Not only did we have to find drivers with the special tuk-tuk license, but we had to make sure they had the right skillset to be the face of the retailer when making deliveries. We also had to work through some trials and errors with implementing the retailer’s tracking system and determining appropriate delivery windows.”
Though it’s only been few months, the team’s hard work already starting to pay off. The program boasts a 98 percent on-time delivery rate, and the team is working to further improve picking times at the fulfillment centers so the program can be expanded.
Daymon is also working with the retailer to support other online options it is developing, such as delivery via a central third-party collection point and to small independent markets called “spazas” for resale in local neighborhoods. As Decker explains, “online grocery shopping is still an emerging channel in South Africa, but our retailer partner is really at the forefront—and we’re proud to support them in furthering that pillar of the business.”
To learn more about partnering with Daymon in South Africa, contact Vice President of International Aaron Gottlieb at agottlieb@daymon.com.