Simon Hedaux

Summary

Simon Hedaux is the founder of world-leading productivity partner Rethink Productivity. He works with retail and hospitality giants – including Costa, Vodafone, Debenhams and Pandora – globally to help deliver their business goals: “I have a retail background and learning from experience. I have always been interested in improving productivity and business performance so I decided to go on my own, as an entrepreneur to help other organisations and that is how ReThink was born. Now, after 9 years working in this area I consider myself as a sort of productivity geek.”

Biography

Simon Hedaux is the founder and CEO of ReThink Productivity. His pioneering methods allow businesses to drive efficiency, boost productivity and optimise budgets. For nearly a decade ReThink has been transforming the way some of the world’s biggest companies operate – refining their processes, reviewing their systems, analysing change impact and ensuring they’re operating at maximum efficiency and productivity levels.

Simon Hedaux offers unrivalled expertise in helping businesses to manage whatever challenges they’re facing – whether they’re attempting to scale at pace, cut costs, stay agile to cope with ever changing customer expectations and operating model challenges or structure leadership teams to deliver business objectives. They make sure every penny spent is aligned to the company goals. ReThink works with everyone from small chains and medium sized organisations to multi-chain, multinational businesses, at every stage in their journey – whether they’re at crisis point or boasting rapid growth.

Exclusive ‘Data Bank’

Through his work with over 45 companies, Simon has created an invaluable ‘benchmarking data bank’. This offers an exclusive insight into the productivity and efficiency levels of companies worldwide – and the most impactful tactics to improve this.

Innovative New Model

Simon Hedaux has spotted a gap in the market – consultancies that measured performance existed and consultancies that helped improve productivity existed – but what really creates lasting improvement is combining detailed analysis with a strategic business perspective to drive new value. ReThink Productivity was born out of this.

 Expertise

Simon’s expertise combines 5 crucial areas:

• Efficiency Review – expertly identifying innovative ways organisations can streamline processes
• Time & Motion Studies – gathering data about the time it takes for staff to complete tasks, to facilitate highly accurate budget and resource planning
• Optimise Labour Budgets – Leveraging workload analysis and budgeting experience to build transparent models that are easy to work with
• Workforce Management – consulting on the most strategic, sustainable and effective ways to manage workforces
• Organisational Design – enabling businesses to get their leadership structure right

Simon Hedaux is a charismatic and engaging speaker and is available to provide expert comment, interviews, and by-lined articles on a number of topics, including:

• CASE STUDY: How Vodafone boosted their efficiency by 7%
• The cost of a queue – How much revenue are you losing to lines?
• How to spot tech that is harming your productivity
• Do you know where your staff are really adding value?
• A well-oiled machine? How to identify your ideal team structure
• Surprising productivity lessons from some of the world’s most efficient companies
• CASE STUDY: How Debenhams gained 60 lost hours a week – in every store
• How to cut costs without killing customer experience
• Power to the People – How to keep staff engaged in operational changes
• Meaningful measurement – How to make data-driven decisions
• CASE STUDY: How Costa Coffee transformed customer waiting times

Case Studies are available for:

Costa, Debenhams, Vodafone, Pandora, Wickes and Mothercare

Vision

How to Driving performance

Simon Hedaux identifies multi-million-pound productivity opportunities and helps the world’s biggest businesses get ahead. Measures, analyses and creates a detailed roadmap to make lasting improvements to the way companies operate and optimise performance. Offers an exclusive insight – generated from ReThink’s exclusive benchmarking dataset – into some of the world’s biggest companies’ productivity and efficiency, and how to boost it

About ReThink and the current business ecosystem.

“9 years ago we were still in the dawn of the digital transformation, still based heavily on paper. One of the reasons behind me and my colleagues founding ReThink is to help businesses understand the benefits of going digital: it will boost the company’s performance, they will be able to attract more customers and streamline operations, among other benefits. Almost a decade later, we have helped dozens of organisations with that swift and now we see how the world is more digitized as it has ever been.”

About productivity

“Let’s take retail as an example. Big corporation’s productivity goes around labour productivity and how long it will take for every operation / process to be done. So every action should go around makes these processes as smooth and efficient as possible and that also implies making sure customers get what they want as easy too. Basically, productivity is how long it takes for a person to perform a specific task. Something I have learned over the years is how important is to make the customer’s journey as quick and as smooth as possible because people don’t want to spend time or complicate things when they approach a company. And most solutions in terms of productivity go in that direction.”

How ReThink works

“Firstly we try to define what that company needs, whether it is about saving money, improving sales, etc. Once we have that written down we go to the physical location,study that company’s operations and spend some time preparing a strategy. The things we look at are how much time they spend in dealing with the customers, how much time in preparations, the customer’s journey, etc. We gather all this data and build a customized strategy for them. Then we track how these solutions are being implemented and see if it is giving the expected results. One of the most important things as digitization takes place is to understand the customer journey and we have insights based on data. This helps us understand what customers do when reaching a certain point, how long they spend on which page, how far is the product they want, conversions, etc.

Data, then, is critical to create a model that can be adjusted to organisations and get the best results. And most importantly, we need to understand this data. One of the case studies we had last year was about transactions. We found out that promoting contactless payments increased customers served and sales. But we also have to take into consideration all the variables when committing to a specific solution. We have developed a time emotion model including behaviour into the equation. In that model, employees need to be trained in observation and intelligence emotion to be able to make better decisions when dealing with customers. And AI and ML will really help analysing data and translating it, also improving efficiency of systems and models.”

COVID-19 disruption

“It is a challenge for businesses as they have to work from home and disrupt their legacy business operations. At the same time, it opens up opportunities as it provides workers and employers more flexibility. There are pros and cons: workers save time in commuting but working from home also makes people work longer hours, and that is the trade off. We now need to keep working on defining the best balance where productivity can be boosted but also avoiding burnout or extra stress. And as of now, we are in this interval where companies are still adapting to the new normality but it is the only way forward.

Digital transformation is interesting. It is not an evolution but a revolution. We have seen many organisations talking about digital transformation but they still move most of the processes in paper. From my experience, at least that organization is digital native, companies still struggle, especially in the retail sector.”

References

www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk

https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonhedaux

https://powertolivemore.com/podcasts/simon-hedaux/

https://issuu.com/retailnews/docs/rn_june_low_res_an_post/s/10689811

https://www.globaltrademag.com/author/shedauz/

https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business–Economics-Podcasts/ReThink-Productivity-Podcast-p1321543/

https://www.mytotalretail.com/article/post-covid-how-retailers-can-improve-productivity/

https://www.icaew.com/technical/business-and-management/business-and-management-faculty/business-and-management-magazine/bam-february-2020/drive-your-decisions-with-data