Industry
Retail, Convenience stores
About
Ramsdens Today’s Extra convenience store is part of The Ramsden Group, a leading UK retailer and wholesaler.
The store is a multi-functional hub providing various services to the local community: groceries, post office, fresh coffee, takeaway food and more. It was ranked among top 100 independent local shops in the UK.
Location
Grimsby, United Kingdom
The requirement: effectively ensuring store standards and safety
Ramsdens Today’s Extra is a multi-functional convenience store offering fresh groceries and additional services such as post office, coffee shop and more. It is part of the wider British operations of the wholesaler and retailer Ramsden Group of Companies.
“Before we found GoAudits, monitoring, recording and reporting retail standards were time-consuming processes that were not particularly effective”, explains John Heagney, Strategic Retail Advisor for Ramsdens. “Benchmarking sites lacked consistency and the communication processes were clunky and not fast enough.”
As a key business, the Ramsdens convenience store was operating fully throughout the pandemic. In addition to monitoring store standards, it became essential to ensure staff and customer safety with stringent Covid-19 prevention measures. This became especially challenging as Head Office visits became less plentiful due to Covid concerns.
Choosing GoAudits to manage store standards
The store team initially started using GoAudits for daily and weekly Covid-19 safety checks: hygiene, social distancing measures, customer signage… However they soon realised the app could help them efficiently monitor all quality and safety standards across the store.
Ramsdens Today’s Extra offers groceries, fresh produce, coffee, takeaway food and postal office services to the community
Routine daily and weekly self-inspections
The store team soon realised the GoAudits app could help them efficiently monitor all quality and safety standards across the store. “We realised the potential advantage of GoAudits in the early days of the pandemic and instigated regular Covid safety reporting. This was followed rapidly with full Store Standards reporting,” explains John Heagney.
The team started using GoAudits for routine daily and weekly self-inspections to ensure the highest standards of the store facilities, equipment and operations:
Example – GoAudits inspections checklists
- General store appearance and cleanliness
- Promotions and merchandising
- Daily standard operating procedures such as opening/closing
- Regular Covid-19 safety checks: PPE, hand sanitation stations, frequent-touch surface disinfection, presence of customer signage, verifying the latest applicable regulations etc
- Food safety and hygiene, refrigerator and food temperature checks
- Coffee station checks
- General maintenance and equipment checks
- Inventory management
- Health and safety (fire extinguishers…)
- …and more
GoAudits has been enormously helpful to ensure that all group stores are operating at the highest of standards.
The immediacy of the reports and the ongoing benchmarking are now set into our culture and became an important part of our overall store support mechanisms.
John Heagney
Strategic Retail Advisor
Ramsdens Group of Companies
The monitoring of standards and instant reporting become part of the culture
The whole Ramsdens team highlighted that GoAudits was a great step forward in terms of better control and visibility, without extra administrative burden.
Describing the key benefits, John Heagney said: “Our team particularly appreciated how easy the app is to use, the friendly GoAudits customer support team, as well as the rapid reporting and accurate audit performance trail – all immediately accessible by the Head Office.”
Finally, John highlights how GoAudits contributed to making frequent standard monitoring part of routine operations and quality control processes across the group:
“All of this has been enormously helpful to ensure that all group stores are operating at the highest of standards, especially at a time that Head Office visits are less frequent due to Covid safety concerns. The immediacy of the GoAudits reporting and the ongoing benchmarking are now set into our culture and became an important part of our overall store support mechanisms.”
For more information on GoAudits and checklists for retail, click here.
Examples of GoAudits inspection reports with automated scores and trends
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