Category: Case Study

Featuring Gordon Macpherson, Group Productivity Director, Morrisons | Bahareh Ghazinoori, Global VP of Account Management, YOOBIC

TL;DR

UK retailers are facing £5.6bn in additional operating costs in 2025/26. In that environment, execution that relies on paper, PDFs, and manual follow-up isn’t just inefficient — it’s a direct drag on margin.

At Retail Technology Show 2026, Morrisons and YOOBIC shared how they tackled that problem head-on: replacing fragmented, paper-based task management with a single digital execution platform across approximately 500 stores and 70,000 colleagues. Weekly task volumes fell from 80–100 items to approximately 10 targeted actions per manager, routed directly to the responsible colleague.

The result: real-time completion visibility, higher promotional participation, improved safe and legal compliance, and time savings validated by internal time-and-motion studies. And with that foundation in place, Morrisons is now building toward automated tasks and an AI-generated intelligence layer — work that would not be possible without getting the basics right first.

Why store execution is a margin issue right now

UK retailers are absorbing the largest cost increase in a generation. According to research by Retail Economics and YOOBIC, the sector faces a £5.6bn operating cost headwind in 2025/26, driven by higher employer National Insurance contributions, rising minimum wage rates, and increased business rates. Margins in food retail were already thin. They are thinner now.

In that environment, operational waste is not a background inefficiency. It is a direct threat to profitability. Every task that goes unactioned, every promotion that doesn’t land as planned, every compliance check that gets missed — each one costs money the business cannot afford to lose twice.

For a deeper breakdown of how execution gaps translate into lost revenue, read our guide to the retail execution gap.

And yet many retailers are still trying to solve that problem with paper, PDFs, and cascading instructions through store managers who have a hundred other things to manage. The gap between what head office asks and what actually gets done in stores is structural. It doesn’t close by asking harder. It closes by changing the system.

That’s the problem Morrisons set out to solve. Gordon Macpherson, Group Productivity Director at Morrisons, knows it from the inside. He’s been the regional manager who visits a store four weeks after his last trip and can’t remember what he asked the team to do. The team remembers. They’ve been waiting to find out whether the instruction still stands.

At Retail Technology Show 2026, Macpherson and Bahareh Ghazinoori, Global VP of Account Management at YOOBIC, walked through how Morrisons rebuilt its store execution model from the ground up — and why getting that foundation right was a deliberate precondition for everything that comes next.

Here’s what they did, and what it means for any retail operations leader who recognizes the same problems in their own estate.

The system that made consistent execution almost impossible

The starting point, as Macpherson described it at the session, was an operational model held together by paper, PDFs, and manual follow-up. Each week, 80 to 100 tasks went out to stores from head office. Most of them landed with the store manager, who was expected to cascade them to the relevant colleague, then remember to check whether they had been done.

In practice, that chain broke regularly. Regional teams spent time on collation calls and spreadsheets. Supplier partners visited stores and found incomplete activations. Some came back with financial reimbursements. The cost of inconsistent execution was not abstract.

The impact showed up in three ways: critical tasks were missed or poorly executed, supplier and commercial relationships were strained, and management time was consumed by follow-up rather than coaching. In a tight-margin food retail environment, none of those outcomes was sustainable.

This type of fragmented communication is one of the biggest barriers to consistent execution in stores. Learn how leading retailers are solving this in our guide to frontline communications.

The real change: fewer tasks, routed to the right person

Morrisons reduced weekly task volumes from 80–100 items to approximately 10 targeted actions per manager and routed each task directly to the responsible colleague rather than through the store manager. This removed the manual cascading dependency, gave regional teams real-time completion visibility, and freed store managers to focus on exceptions rather than administration.

When tasks go directly to the colleague responsible for completing them, accountability becomes clear and the store manager is no longer the relay point for every instruction. Macpherson illustrated this with a concrete example from the session. When Morrisons changes the café menu on a Monday morning at 9am, a task now goes directly to every café manager across the estate. The store manager can see whether it has been completed. So can the regional manager and head office. If it has not been done, the store manager receives a prompt.

The trended data changes the management conversation. A regional manager who previously suspected a store had a fresh area problem can now see it in two months of data and have a specific, evidence-based coaching conversation, rather than a subjective debrief.

From planning to first store in three months

Ghazinoori was direct about the deployment model at the session: rolling a platform out to 70,000 people is a change management initiative, not a technology installation. With that many end users, there is no room to get it wrong and course-correct in public.

Morrisons went from planning to live in the first store within three months. The full rollout across approximately 500 stores followed region by region over the following months. That pace was possible because the build phase was slow and deliberate.

Macpherson noted the team made significant changes during the testing phase based on feedback from store colleagues. Getting it right in the office was not the standard. Getting it right for the frontline was.

Morrisons did not roll out hardware alongside the platform. YOOBIC was made available on existing store devices, tablets, and back-office systems. Most colleagues opted into using their own personal devices without being asked.

Why commercial execution came before health and safety

Use case sequencing was a deliberate strategic decision, not a phasing convenience. Ghazinoori explained how the team mapped every potential use case against two variables: complexity to build, and expected impact for store teams.

Low complexity, high impact goes first. That is where the initial momentum comes from.

The temperature check integration illustrates how phase two raised the technical bar. When a colleague plugs a Bluetooth probe into food, the reading populates directly within the task. If the temperature falls outside the permitted range, the system triggers an automated alert and corrective action to the responsible manager. What previously required manual logging and reactive follow-up now happens automatically.

Starting with commercial use cases built familiarity with the platform before phase two introduced compliance-critical processes. Store teams had already experienced it working for them. That made adoption of the more demanding use cases smoother.

This sequencing mirrors how many retailers approach visual merchandising and promotional execution, where speed and consistency directly impact revenue.

What the data looks like now

Macpherson was measured about the outcomes at the session. Morrisons is not perfect, he said. But the foundation has changed.

The commercial evidence is visible. Higher promotional participation, better key deals performance, and sharper trade plan implementation have all moved in the right direction. Time savings for managers were validated through internal time-and-motion studies. Safe and legal compliance visibility has improved materially.

The outcome that tells the most instructive story is the two-way accountability loop. Before YOOBIC, head office issued instructions and waited for feedback to arrive through informal channels. Now the data surfaces immediately.

In the previous system, 270 stores missing a menu change would have surfaced gradually through visits, complaints, and calls. The root cause would have been attributed to store performance by default. Real-time data makes the diagnosis accurate and immediate. That changes who the 

Connecting execution data with commercial performance is what allows retailers to move from reporting to action.

Making performance visible without making it feel like surveillance

When asked about cultural pushback at the session, Macpherson acknowledged the tension directly. Making execution data visible does create accountability that did not previously exist. There is no point pretending otherwise.

How that accountability is led determines whether the platform is received as support or oversight.

Ghazinoori added that the rollout framing was as important as the platform itself. The question put to store teams during piloting was not whether they could use the app, but whether it would improve their day-to-day. Their feedback was incorporated before wider deployment, not after.

Seventy thousand colleagues are active users. Most opted into using the platform on their own personal devices without being asked. That is the strongest signal of how the adoption landed.

From foundation to intelligence: what Morrisons is building next

The work Morrisons completed over the past year was never just about fixing task management. It was about building the operational foundation that makes everything else possible. Paper-based processes are gone. Point solutions have been consolidated into a single platform. Health and safety, communications, and task management now run through one system, with every action routed to the right person from the start.

That foundation matters — because without it, the next two stages of this journey aren’t available. Retailers who skipped this phase, or patched it with disconnected tools, have to go back and rebuild before they can move forward. Morrisons don’t.

Automated tasks: rules-based execution at scale

The first stage beyond foundational execution is automation — and it’s important to be precise about what that means. Automated tasks are not AI. They are logic. A human defines a rule upfront; the system executes it automatically when the condition is met.

Morrisons operates between 400 and 600 AI cameras per store. When a camera detects an empty shelf, the system automatically generates a replenishment task and routes it directly to the relevant colleague. No one is watching the feed. No one has to decide whether to act. The condition is met, the task fires, and the store team gets a clear action to complete. The human role is the response, not the monitoring.

This kind of automation removes a whole category of manual detection and delegation from store operations. It’s fast, consistent, and doesn’t depend on anyone noticing the problem first.

AI-generated tasks: intelligence, not just logic

The stage above automation is meaningfully different, and the distinction is worth being clear about because the market conflates the two constantly.

With automated tasks, a human programmed the rule. The system is doing exactly what it was told to do when a specific condition occurs. With AI-generated tasks, no human defined the rule. The AI analyses multiple data streams simultaneously — sales patterns, stock levels, camera feeds, traffic data, historical benchmarks — and surfaces a recommended action that no one anticipated in advance.

That’s the principle the AI layer is built around. It isn’t reporting what happened. It’s telling the store team what they should probably be doing right now, based on everything the system is seeing across the estate.

The longer-term vision Macpherson described is YOOBIC as the single platform every frontline colleague goes to for everything — cameras, digital shelf labels, supply chain systems, communications, and tasks all surfaced in one place. That level of integration only works if the execution layer beneath it is solid. The foundation has to come first. Morrisons built it first. That’s what makes everything above it viable.

Before and after: how task management changed at Morrisons

Five takeaways from the Morrisons deployment

1.  Task volume and task routing are the structural variables. Reducing from 80–100 weekly tasks to approximately 10 targeted actions was not a reduction in rigor. It was a recognition that volume without clear routing produces inconsistency. The platform makes direct routing possible. The task design makes it real.

2.  Direct routing removes the manager cascading dependency. When tasks go to the responsible colleague, completion accountability is clear and the store manager can focus on exceptions. That changes the nature of the management role.

3.  Use case sequencing is an adoption strategy. Starting with high-impact, low-complexity commercial use cases before moving into compliance-critical processes builds frontline familiarity and trust. Phase two works because phase one was done well.

4.  Visibility creates accountability in both directions. The same data that shows a store has not completed a task also shows when head office failed to send the materials needed to complete it. Two-way visibility changes who the conversation is with.

5.  The execution foundation has to come before the intelligence layer. Automated tasks and AI-generated task generation both require a functioning execution infrastructure beneath them. Morrisons built the foundation first. That sequencing is the model.

The foundation changes what becomes possible

Four weeks after a store visit, a regional manager should be able to see exactly what they asked stores to do, who completed it, and what the quality looked like. That visibility did not exist at Morrisons two years ago. It exists now.

The session at RTS 2026 traced how that change happened: a deliberate deployment, a phased use case approach, a frontline-first rollout, and a task structure that routes work to the right person from the start.

What comes next — automated tasks triggered by AI cameras, an AI-generated intelligence layer surfacing recommended actions, a single platform connecting cameras, supply chain, and communications — is only viable because that execution foundation is in place. Morrisons did not start with AI. They started with clarity about who is responsible for what, and whether it got done. That is the right sequence.

The Morrisons session in one takeaway

Store performance improves when teams focus on fewer priorities, with clearer ownership and real visibility into what gets done. But that’s only the beginning. The retailers who invest in getting that foundation right are the ones who will have access to automation and AI that actually works — because the execution layer beneath it is solid.

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