Home Depot Canada’s MET team meets with vendors
This article is from Hardlines. Hardlines is Canada’s weekly home improvement newsletter and is a must read for anyone involved in any category of hardlines retail and wholesale in Canada. Hardlines often includes unique and early-breaking news essential to all players in the hardlines arena. For a subscription, please visit www.hardlines.ca
TORONTO — A series of meetings with more than 300 of its active vendors was held last Friday at Home Depot Canada’s Innovation Centre. The purpose of the meetings was to familiarize the vendors directly with the giant retailer’s new in-store servicing initiative, its Merchandising Excellence Team. MET will eventually replace vendors’ own in-store service teams.
Phase One of the program deals with the lighting and electrical categories. The pilot will be rolled out in mid-late fall across all 179 Home Depot Canada stores. Phase Two will involve seasonal products that have to be ready by spring 2011.
MET is overseen by Joe Allen, Director of Vendor Services, who along with his head-office team, will manage more than 1,000 new employees. He reports to Gino DiGioacchino, Home Depot Canada’s Vice-President of Merchandising. DiGioacchino updated HARDLINES on Friday’s meetings, which aimed to lay out how Home Depot will actually execute its new program. That includes how the new servicing staff will be trained and how their performance will be measured.
DiGioacchino says sales will be a benchmark, for sure, but adds that the in-stock position of the products will be critical, as well. “Our goal is always to get it at 100%.”
Vendors themselves will have a say in measuring the process. “A monthly ‘Voice of Supplier’ survey will have about 20-30 questions in it so vendors can report back themselves, based on what they see happening with their products on the store shelves.”
Vendors are also expected to turn over detailed information about how they did the servicing job themselves before. “One of the key elements we need from the vendors to work on this is their Key Services Guide,” says DiGioacchino. It will be used to help MET manage the vendors’ products – and the entire category.
“It used to be product-centric,” he says. “Now it’s category-centric, to help us see the category the way the customer views it. Servicing that strategy is what MET does.”
Vendors have expressed concern that some major vendors, such as Moen and Behr, which have dedicated teams of their own, may be allowed to leave those teams intact. “Depending on the level of service they provide, there will be a few,” DiGioacchino admits. “These teams are world class and we can learn from them.”
Leave a Reply