Waitrose Porter's 5 Forces

3. Managing Demand
It is difficult to deal with customer’s demands especially in the businesses that provide variety of products and services, such as supermarkets. Waitrose and some other brands use barcode scanning and also member card to collect shopper’s behaviour data for each branch so that they would be able to preliminary forecast those consumption trends (O’keeffe and Fearne, 2002) However, it is unavoidable to face with uncertainties. There are both short-term uncertainties which are occurred in day-to-day processing or unexpected situation, and long-term uncertainties as seasonal demands and price fluctuations (Gupta and Maranas, 2003). Duffy and Fearne (2004) also add their argument about establishing promotion may affect demand
Hyland et al. (2003) claim that knowledge management throughout the supply chain is required, but persuading workers to change their learning manners and become initiative people is tough because, from their research, those workers prefer working with their past experiences. Moreover, O’keeffe and Fearne (2002) state that another obstacle for the improvement is high employees’ turnover rate which causes difficulty in preserving and developing organisations’ core knowledge. As Waitrose’s policy, they concern on staff stability to ensure that the employees would be able to learn and improve in-depth knowledge about their positions (i.e. spend approximately four or five years in the departments). However, labour movement on supplier’s side is out of their control and become a key problem to their
Firstly, the supplier relation which has the significant problem in lack of trust between entities that prevents them to construct closer relation for long-term advantages. Besides those key external suppliers, Waitrose also own their internal farm. However, excessive costs from any improvements to satisfy internal customer might be overbalanced and hiring outsources may generate better benefits. Secondly, demand volatility is still trouble for Waitrose (and also other stores) because the plan would be affected by forecasting variances and they probably lose their competitiveness. Finally, the presence of effective operations could increase customer’s confidence. Waitrose used SEDEX to ensure the quality of their suppliers, and also support continuous improvement by maintaining staff stability to preserve and develop the company’s know-how. Contrarily, due to the variety of entities along supply chain, it would be difficult to force the others to operate in the same