Operational planning for public holidays in grocery retailing - managing the grocery retail rush

Abstract

Public holiday weeks cause specific challenges in grocery retailing as sales are raising and working days for logistics processes are reduced. The paper analyzes the operational planning challenges and solutions for demand planning and disposition as well as for warehouse and transportation management of grocery retailers in public holiday seasons. A total of 22 top managers representing 20 sales lines of 17 of the top 30 grocery retailers in Germany participated in the study. Semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with logistics managers were conducted and analyzed. Uncertainties and missing resources can be identified as the two main challenges of public holiday seasons in grocery retailing. Retailers implement numerous measures that can be summarized in three categories, i.e., the adjustment of workload profiles, the adaptation of resources and modifying processes. Literature has so far considered public holidays only to a limited extent, e.g., as a parameter in forecasting models or for the application of marketing instruments. This study is the first developing a framework and providing insights into operational planning in grocery retailing.

Strategic Inventory Management: Exploring the Interplay of Holidays, Market Demand, and Financial Factors

“…Public holidays are associated with increased revenue and play an important role in annual performance. As A result, retailers offer many promotional articles to boost sales during the holiday season [11].…”

Decision support for managing assortments, shelf space, and replenishment in retail

“…The tradeoff between replenishment from backroom stock and direct shelf replenishment can therefore be analyzed using the modeling approach proposed. Nevertheless, in several circumstances backroom stock cannot be avoided, e.g., in the case of scarce capacity at the DC that forces early transfer of inventory downstream to the stores, allowing large delivery intervals to save transportation costs, and intra-day replenishments for high-frequency product demand (Obermair et al 2023;Pires et al 2020;Tompkins 2014).…”