■ Three-year contract win with Waitrose and John Lewis.
■ Demand driven by increased management of workforces through data-driven remote monitoring.
Technology group Checkit (CKT:47p) has won a three-year contract to provide all Waitrose and John Lewis stores with its Connected Workflow Management, Connected Automated Monitoring and Connected Building Management services. The platform digitises the scheduling and reporting of operational workflows with a view to automating manual processes, increasing efficiency and delivering greater management insight. It’s no coincidence that John Lewis Partnership (JLP) chairman Sharon White has announced plans to make £300m of annual cost cuts by 2022 to help fund £1bn of investment across stores and e-commerce.
By expanding the suite of services it provides, Checkit aims to support JLP in improving the quality and consistency of end-to-end processes by replacing paper and documents with digital process tools. In addition, its workflow management tools will deliver new insights and operational key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to analyse performance and identify training needs, as well as generating automatic digital records for in-house and third-party quality inspections. The contract win not only highlights how the retail sector is adopting new technology, but the business opportunity for Checkit to exploit as I have highlighted (‘Investments for the new normal’, 17 Sep 2020).