Company Overview Of Publix's Super Market

Publix Super Markets
Publix Supermarkets is a growing supermarket chain based out of the southeastern United States. As Publix continues to expand the company has been reporting increasingly good numbers in both sales, and customer satisfaction. However, in the past 12-18 months Publix has begun running into not only stiff competition in new markets (Cloud, Sales and Earnings down at Publix), but declining sales in stores that were open at the same time last year across all departments (bakery, deli, meat & seafood, grocery, and produce). (Copeland, “Publix Ways to Improve”) This is just the main symptom of Publix’s main problems which are that innovation often takes a very long time, but is increasingly shot down, and that Publix is unwilling

With new competition entering the grocery market Publix’s competitive advantage of product quality is diminishing. To maintain and maximize profits Publix needs to find a new competitive advantage. One such competitive advantage is their specialty departments primarily the deli. The way that Publix can achieve this is by marketing their deli more as a place to eat, and even one day as its own standalone restaurant like Subway. By branching out being a more proactive organization or one that “monitors trends, identifies the future needs of existing customers, and anticipate changes in demand” (Dees, McNamara and Eisner, p. 404). Publix can capitalize on the sub market by increasing the development of their most successful product

The corporate level associates are dealing with outdated Microsoft applications that force the associates to spend more time on a task that newer application would be able to do very quickly. This would help increase productivity and allow the corporate level associates to focus more on providing new ideas and streamlining more processes. The associates at the warehouse level use outdated speak to select headphones, which can often mishear the associates words causing them to stop and must repeat themselves until the headpiece understands what they are trying to say. The associates at the stores in retail are constantly dealing with safety hazards as well as old pieces of equipment that require more force and time to perform a task that a newer piece of equipment can make very easy. To best implement new technology first Publix needs to identify what technology can be improved and would have the greatest value to the associates or the end users. A survey should be sent out with a one-month deadline for all responses. Once the data has been collected another one-month period to analyze and measure which products would best help all the associates perform their job duties more productively. Then a test phase of 3-6 months for selected associates and stores to use the newer pieces of technology and obtain their feedback on if it helped them in their day to day job,