Merchandising and Marketing Organizational Design Case Study

Client: A $1B+ national big box retailer

The challenge

In striving to improve the organizational design for its merchandising and marketing divisions, this retailer had the objective to streamline its organization to achieve substantial payroll cost savings while improving overall cross-functional effectiveness. However, the executive team struggled to determine the tactics to achieve this in the right way due to the proliferation of roles and breadth of employees across the two departments.

Our approach

To set a current state baseline of the retailer’s merchandising and marketing divisions, PwC Canada’s Retail Consulting Services practice introduced their proprietary work activity analysis (WAA) process to facilitate a detailed review of its employee’s day-to-day activities (45 unique WAA forms across 300+ employees). This would provide the executive team with a baseline snapshot of their organization and enabling them to gain insights and a validation mechanism from a bottom-up perspective.

Providing visibility into its employee’s activities from the ground-level would allow the executive team to make decisions with the required “science” that would instill confidence to all parties that decisions made to shape the go-forward organization would be done the right way. With PwC Canada's Retail Consulting Services’ extensive experience in redesigning merchandising and marketing organizations, we guided the executive team to ensure that the go-forward organization structure would be sustainable and represent a marked improvement over its previous structure while simultaneously reducing payroll costs.

The result

• Leveraged the WAA analysis with the executive team to help identify and brainstorm opportunities to shape the future organizational design, such as over-investment and under-investment in certain areas (i.e., focus areas that are not being resourced appropriately)
• Realized over millions of dollars in sustained payroll savings in the future state merchandising organizational design, while improving overall effectiveness and alignment with corporate and merchandising strategies and initiatives