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Purpose -This paper explores tactical planning in grocery retailing and proposes how process and integration mechanisms from sales and operations planning (S&OP) can enhance retail tactical planning. Design/methodology/approach -This work follows an explorative design with case studies from the grocery retailing industry in Finland, Norway, and the UK. Findings -The tactical planning process focuses on demand management and securing product availability from suppliers in order to reach sales targets. Less attention is directed towards balancing supply and demand or towards providing a single plan to guide company operations. Planning appeared to be functionally oriented with limited coordination between functional plans, but it did include external integration that improved forecast accuracy.Research limitations/implications -The study involves grocery retailer cases with variable level of S&OP maturity. The propositions need to be investigated further through action research or additional case studies to confirm their validity. Practical implications -The study proposes a design of an S&OP process in retailing and propositions for improving tactical planning integration. Originality/value -The study complements research on retail tactical planning by taking planning process and integration viewpoints. The research suggests that retailers would benefit from a formal and company-wide S&OP process to unify different market-oriented plans to a single set of numbers, thus better balancing supply and demand without sacrificing the emphasis on demand planning.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of sharing and utilizing remaining shelf life (RSL) information from grocery stores by the use of age-based replenishment policies for perishables. Design/methodology/approach The performance is evaluated through a discrete event simulation model, which mirrors a part of one of Norway’s largest grocery retailer and uses their POS data to reflect a realistic demand pattern of 232 stores for one year. Findings The findings indicate that a current age-based replenishment policy (EWA policy) provides a significant improvement of 17.7 percent increase in availability for perishables with a shelf life between 4 and 11 days, but suffers from high inventory levels and only reduces waste by 3.4 percent compared to a base stock policy. A proposed adjustment to the EWA policy, EWASS, provides a more balanced performance in the conducted study with a reduction of 10.7 percent waste and 10.3 percent increase in availability by keeping the same average inventory level. Practical implications Sharing and utilizing RSL information for replenishment of perishables with a predetermined shelf life between 6 and 11 days can be beneficial, and could enable the replenishment processes to be automated. However, for products with longer shelf life, the benefits slowly diminish. Originality/value The study proposes a new age-based replenishment policy which in the conducted study showed a more balanced performance improvement, in both waste and availability, compared with previous replenishment policies.

Abstract. This paper describes a case study which highlights responsiveness in a Norwegian retail supply chain. The dynamics in the conventional food market is increasing which is seen in online and multichannel shopping concepts, a wide range of campaigns and promotions, and demographic changes. While the conventional food supply chains are designed to handle large product volumes efficiently, this might impact on the responsiveness. This study explores the relation between the responsiveness of the food retail supply chains in Norway and proposes how the planning and control models should be developed.