Coordinating 80+ Store Refurbishments Without Missing a Delivery

Store refurbishments look simple from the outside — new fixtures go in, the old ones come out, the store reopens looking fresh. What's invisible is the procurement and logistics sitting underneath: coordinating fixtures and fit-out materials for more than 80 Coles store refurbishments, on a schedule that didn't bend for any single supplier's convenience.

The stakes here are different from a normal reorder. A late shipment to a warehouse is an inconvenience. A late fixture delivery to a store mid-refurbishment is a store that can't reopen on schedule, with a retail partner watching the date.

Why 100% mattered more than usual

We hit 100% stock accuracy and on-time, in-full delivery across the program — a target that sounds routine until you consider the number of moving parts working against it. Every store had its own fit-out spec, its own delivery window, its own trade and logistics partners to coordinate with. Multiply that by 80-plus, and the room for a single supplier to quietly slip a date shrinks to almost nothing before it starts affecting a live store timeline.

Getting there meant treating each refurbishment less like an isolated order and more like a small project with its own critical path — tracking exactly which fixtures were needed, by when, at which specific location, and confirming rather than assuming that trade and logistics partners had what they needed to hit that date.

What scale actually teaches you

A single refurbishment is a task. Eighty of them running in parallel is a system, and systems fail differently than tasks do — not through one dramatic mistake, but through small slippages compounding quietly until a pattern of lateness becomes visible too late to fix. The discipline that matters at that scale isn't heroics on any one order. It's the boring, consistent habit of checking the same things the same way, every single time, so nothing gets a chance to compound.