How We Help Clients

Organization

We help retailers develop robust structures and build capabilities to meet their most pressing organizational challenges.

Driven by competition and consolidation, large, complex retail enterprises operate across countries, channels, categories, and formats. While size and scope afford economies of scale, they also present considerable structural challenges.

We work with retailers to manage organizational complexity and design robust organizations that fit their specific needs. Our experts offer deep retail knowledge and the latest thinking on organizational health and performance. We have completed hundreds of projects on retail organization over the past 5 years.

We help our clients’ organizations become more efficient, faster, leaner, and more effective so they can achieve stronger growth, higher margins, and deliver consistently higher quality to their customers.

What we do

  • Operating model transformation: Make fundamental decisions about organizational—including enterprise-level and function-specific structural choices—ways of working, roles and responsibilities, and decision right clarity, as well as process simplification.
  • Agile ways of working: Quickly identify and unlock the greatest sources of value through agile ways of working and empowered decision-making across cross-functional teams. We apply advanced analytics, digital tools, technology expertise, and multidisciplinary agile coaching to achieve step-change results.
  • Organizational health: Achieve new levels of performance by conducting quantitative diagnostics to benchmark a company’s organizational health against peers, establish concrete change initiatives based on proven recipes, and design a transformation approach that aligns the organization around targeted priorities.
  • Capability building: Build and adapt the skills, mindsets, and behaviors required to sustain the long-term impact of organizational change. We provide top-level client-learning programs to strengthen leadership skills, while our functional capability building programs provide turnkey approaches and consist of complete training modules to help transform the organization.
  • Talent: Respond to automation, growing skill gaps, and the need to deploy or redeploy talent quickly to unleash the true potential of an organization’s people. We partner with organizations on strategic and analytics-supported talent management, workforce strategy and planning, and reskilling at scale.
  • Merger management: Maximize the success of end-to-end M&A activity by tailoring our market-leading M&A blueprint for strategy, deal identification, and execution, and merger integration methodology to address the specific objectives of each retail merger.

Featured capabilities

  • Retail organization database: Proprietary database of functional headcount benchmarks that allows for comprehensive and consistent analysis across all functions of a retail company.
  • Proprietary retail libraries: Proprietary databases and libraries that cover top-team and function-specific organization structures and operating models at leading retailers, as well as best-practice retail process maps and decision rights.
  • Capabilities assessment: A modular capability-diagnostic survey for key retail sectors, such as merchandising, marketing, and operations.
  • OrgLab: Enables successful organizational transformations through data diagnostics and design capabilities.
  • Organizational Health Index: Put hard numbers and improvement actions on your organization’s health.
  • People Analytics: Use advanced analytics to make better talent decisions.

Featured experts

Kristi Klitsch Weaver
Senior Partner
Shaun Callaghan
Partner
Alexander Thiel
Partner
More people

Featured insight

Crafting a fit-for-future retail operating model
Article

Crafting a fit-for-future retail operating model

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Retailers must move beyond cost cutting to embrace a comprehensive transformation.

Related practice

McKinsey People & Organizational Performance Practice

People & Organizational Performance

We work shoulder-to-shoulder with our clients to ensure their organizations are capable of achieving the transformation they want and sustaining it for years to come.

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