A Q&A with Jarad Nass, GM B2B, Woolworths
Jarad Nass, General Manager B2B, joined Woolworths in April 2019 to imagine a new way for businesses to source all their fresh food, kitchen, cleaning supplies and business essentials.
Fast forward to today, he shares his aspirations, his favourite benefits, how Woolworths at Work is solving the challenges we hear from businesses every day, and a sneak peek into some new and exciting technology on the roadmap for the future.
What are your aspirations for Woolworths at Work?
Our main focus with Woolworths at Work is to build a partnership with our customers, so we can in turn evolve the proposition to be aligned to their challenges and opportunities.
“A partner you can trust” really epitomises what we are all about. If customers that engage with our service every day love it, and the businesses they work in feel that we are doing everything we can to make their businesses better, and we can help our customers find ways to be healthier, then we have made a difference and that’s what matters.
I don’t think our job is ever done but the opportunities change depending on the environment around us.
What are you most proud of since we turned on the MVP in September 2020?
Offering Early Learning Centres (ELC) a free menu planning service. It is powered by Nutrition Australia and is built on providing the children with a 5 star nutritional meal. It not only means we are saving the Centre time but also costs by removing the time spent on planning. The plan can also help Centres meet their guidelines.
It is all centred around healthier children, which gives parents peace of mind that they can send their children off and know that they are getting the nutrition they need to help them grow. It really aligns to our group and business purpose of a healthier Australia.
What are your top 5 favourite benefits that we offer?
- We have set up 2-hour delivery windows for customers to receive their orders early on Monday mornings before the working week commences1. Getting the order to businesses when they need it feels like job number 1.
- Our “bagless to bench” service which is now free is another big advantage for not only our customers, but our planet. This is tightly linked to the groups ambitions to remove plastic packaging from deliveries by June 2023, and removes a lot of plastic from our supply chain, all at no charge.
- Our consistent pricing model means that customers receive consistent everyday pricing without the distractions of promotional prices, enabling customers the peace of mind that they can buy what they need every week, without trying to buy in bulk and plan too far in advance, The risk is removed.
- Our new Work Hub gives our customers the ability to add and remove shoppers from their account without the need of calling into our business team. This puts our customers in control of their account directly.
- On top of that the reporting dashboard lets customers know what they are spending weekly and the average order size, so they can ensure that the team members in their business are taking advantage of the free delivery for orders over $992 and maximising the service.
What are the three challenges you hear from customers and what are the solutions that we can have to help solve them?
- We continually hear from businesses with a lot of shoppers and lots of delivery locations that control is the big challenge. Businesses are asking for greater transparency of their grocery purchases. Our smart Work Hub is helping them solve this directly with real-time reporting, along with the ability to be able to setup their account to match their business hierarchy means they can see transactional level spending at different layers in their business. We also hear how important keeping costs under control are and our own brand range over 5000 products gives our customers the best value products as a key range within our curated product assortment.
- Another big challenge facing businesses is efficiency. The more we can make the shopping experience as frictionless as possible, the more time businesses can focus on teaching, caring, and working on their business. Lists make it easy for our customers to have prepared weekly orders so they can drop in once a week and quickly adjust the volume of each product and quickly add a few extra products or remove whats not required. This can give some real time back.
- On top of that accounts teams have access to our billing portal powered by OpyPro, which provides accounts teams with the fastest way to check balances, reconcile accounts via our flexible billing options, and pay their bill with ease. So we not only help the shopper by giving time back, but also the finance and accounts teams.
Can you talk about any new things the team are working on?
We are working daily on improvements and new products for our customers. Continuing to provide greater transparency via the Work Hub is one of our key focus areas. We want to continue to give customers the right tools so the right decisions can be made to run their business as efficiently as possible. Our goal is to give businesses the most amount of control which is self-service.
