CLICKITY CLICK (DON’T BUY THAT!)

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Teams across the business are embracing Charge by identifying IDEAS that can be turned into ACTIONS to quickly generate CASH for our business.

We all love a bit of cheeky online shopping, we can fill our baskets to our hearts content in the comfort of our own home, maybe getting a little ‘click happy’ and then we crash back to reality when we ‘view’ our basket and realise just how much our clicking has cost and promptly close the tab.

Three years ago the Halewood Body Shop team had a similar feeling when they realised they were also getting ‘click happy’ purchasing PPE and not really keeping track of what they were buying or the cost. At that point they were over budget by around £100k for PPE and unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as just closing a tab and abandoning their shopping basket.

Instead they decided they needed to start window shopping first to help them rein in their spending! Richard Chambers, created a digital report which had all the PPE store items and their costs. Each week GLs and PLs would input the items they needed and Josh Keeley would then pull together the total cost of the items and email them back out to the areas so they could see what they were buying and spending before committing at the checkout.

Creating the report was tricky as they needed to make sure it worked for everyone and then roll it out across the Body Shop. They had a few data issues at first but they soon got into the swing of using it and after the first year the numbers spoke for themselves with the Body Shop reducing their spend by an astonishing £75k - going from being £100K over budget to just £15k over budget. However the thrifty bunch didn’t stop there and in the second year they went from being over budget to £20k below budget and as of week 10 this year they were a mind blowing £212k under budget. That’s a remarkable reduction over three years and it’s helped to bring Halewood’s total PPE spend under budget by a massive £178k!

Well done to everyone involved – this is a really great initiative that year-on-year has made improvements for Halewood and the whole business.