Layout design concerns the physical placement of resources which facilitates efficient flow of customers. For supermarkets, layout designing is important because it can have significant effect on the cost and efficiency of an operation and it can entail substantial investment in time and money. In this paper, the five criteria – flexibility, coordination, visibility, use of space and distance traveled – are considered as well as their importance.
Flexibility
Flexibility of layout change and extension is informed by supermarket planning and positioning within location. Ease of change of layout also requires that construction and materials should facilitate easy future adoption and extension without excessive cost/disturbance to occupiers. Supermarket owners should be able to control the layout to some extent especially that future requirements are dynamic and challenging. For the future, this would be relevant on rules imposed on a specific instantiation which are known as preferences, and this should not conflict conformance criteria particularly when considering cost. Supermarket proprietors must be also understood that layout and the associated capability of such move along with the changes with operating requirements. For instance, the shortening of product life cycles and the increased variety in product offerings requires that supermarkets must remain useful over many product generations while also supporting the introduction of a large number of new products (Longstreth, 2000, p. 170). As such, because the proliferation of products makes it difficult to produce accurate forecasts of demand volumes and demand distribution, supermarkets must be able to rapidly reallocate capacity among different products minus the need of major retooling, resource configuration or replacements.
Coordination
Supermarkets as commercial buildings conform to the fact that people make opportunistic use of structure. The layout of the supermarket itself with the orderly arrangement of items on the shelf is an advantage especially because regular shoppers develop routine trajectories through this space, thus creating a sequence of reminders of items to buy (Wilson and Kiel, 2001, p. 126). Coordination in supermarkets covers the functionality of the design wherein which resources including individuals that have similar processes of functions could be grouped together. This is specially needed in supermarkets with a large variety in products or services being delivered and it may not be feasible to dedicate units or departments to each individual product or service category. Therefore, when it is easy to locate individuals, the layout could allow the customers to move to each group of resources based on their individual requirements (Greasley, 2008, p. 28). The key advantage of coordination is supermarket is that it allows a wide variety of routes that may be chosen by customers depending on their needs. Another advantage is that product and/or service range may be extended.
Visibility
Either the range of merchandise is limited or not, layout should surround the customer the customer with merchandise. Fixtures should tap the visibility of these merchandises. Partitioning that enables customer to have a glimpse of the products is a must in supermarkets. Vertical access and visibility is becoming more important as a means of encouraging customers to multi-level retail space. As the amount of available ground floor space increases, space allocation is also becoming apparent. Layout therefore should provide a logic to customer while also helping the retailer to achieve its own objectives in terms of exposing the store visitor to as much of the product range as possible to increase the value of transaction to customer. Nevertheless, supermarkets owners are also advantaged to getting customers to buy additional items that might be linked with intended purchase or by encouraging them to trade up by buying a higher value item than they had originally intended to buy or they may be tempted to buy a completely unplanned purchase in a moment of impulse (Varley and Gillooley, 2001, p. 183).
Use of space
It would be important for supermarkets to make best use of the space available. During layout designing, more space must be given to customers and front office activities. There are two complicating. Spatial relations are important because it implicates element of likeness and association that represents products or services categories (Halper, 2006, p. 8). For instance, there is a space that is devoted to a single product and the next space should be devoted to a product that is of the almost similar category (dental/oral products in close proximities, that is). Simply, space is used to separate entities belonging to different categories. In layouts, space should reflect the effectiveness of managing such to implicate spontaneity which was always favored by shoppers. Supermarket operators must understand that space consumes money hence maximizing space will be an advantage.
Distance traveled
Aside from maximizing the use of space, layout must also aim at optimizing movement and reducing congestion. In supermarkets, the goal is to increase the distance to be traveled by the customer. Customers are channeled up and down aisles and the actual distance traveled is maximized rather than minimized so that the customers are obliged to pass by brightly colored and attractively presented products and hopefully to be tempted to purchase these goods (Wright and Race, 2004, p. 110). Time spent waiting does not add value but in the case that there are things that will keep them busy, this could mean added profitability.
Reference
Greasley, A. (2008). Operations Management. Oxford, UK: Sage Publications, Inc.
Halper, E. B. (2006). Shopping Center and Store Leases. Law Journal Press.
Longstreth, R. (2000). The Drive-In, The Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space. MIT Press.
Varley, R. & Gillooley, D. (2001). Retail product management: buying and merchandising. Routledge: London.
Wilson, R. A. & Kiel, F. C. (2001). The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. MIT Press.
Wright, J. N. & Race, P. (2004). The management of service operations. Cengage Learning EMEA.
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