What business challenges is Tesco trying to address with network collaboration?
Mike McNamara: Any retailer deals with four key business operations: stores, buying, marketing and distribution. These are used throughout our company and are crucial to every one of our markets around the world. Retail, however, is a very local business. Each of these four aspects of operations has their own nuances in each market. But scale is a huge competitive advantage for any retailer. So there’s a balancing act between the unique needs of each market with the efficiencies of replication, centralized distribution and purchasing, and other scale factors. Our goal with using new networked collaboration tools is to tap into the experience and expertise Tesco has developed in the 80 years as a retailer in the United Kingdom. During that time we’ve learned a thing or two. In contrast, we’ve only been overseas for about 10 years, and really have stepped up our international expansion in the past five years.
