Danny Edsall, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Consumer shopping desires and patterns are ever-changing, but the pandemic has yielded a great retail reset that has brought increased stability and profitability from more agile supply chains, a flood of data insights, new strategic partnerships and culture-led innovations developed in an accelerated and widespread digital transformation.

There aren’t many organizations better placed to guide the key retail players through this period of digital enlightenment than Deloitte, the largest professional services firm in the United States. Deloitte Global is one of the leading global providers of audit and assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and related services, operating in 150 countries and employs over 330,000 people worldwide.

Collaborating with Kroger

Danny Edsall is a Principal and Client Services Partner at Deloitte Consulting LLP, helping the retail industry to serve their customers better. Thinking of himself as also like a chief customer officer for Kroger, their relationship has flourished for over a decade. Edsall says it's been highly valuable for both parties.

“Deloitte helps Kroger in many ways. We help Kroger to optimize their tax position, provide advisory services on areas such as cybersecurity, mergers and acquisitions, merchandising, supply chain, digital customer experience and technological innovation. 

With such a large company, we’re talking about large scale people and process transformations and software implementations. We're working across the Kroger enterprise in their stores and in their distribution centers. By helping Kroger to solve some of their toughest challenges and focusing on their biggest opportunities, it's been a highly rewarding working relationship,” said Edsall.

Only the best for Deloitte

Deloitte’s position as market leaders comes with a high bar, taking only the highest achieving, passionate and intellectually capable consultants in the industry. 

“There’s a strong culture of achievement within Deloitte. The consultants themselves get to apply all of that knowledge and experience to meaningful, real-world problems and issues,” he added.

“There’s a significant amount of career enhancement opportunities. Where the rubber meets the road, we're actually helping clients to achieve big and important things. Kroger is a phenomenal collaborator in that respect, as they are pushing the boundaries on innovations in the retail industry,” he said. 

Leading edge developments in the technology and retail world

Such innovations at Kroger have included improved customer service through advanced personalization, where the retailer has been zeroing in on what shoppers want and how best to meet their requirements.

“By assisting with their in-store customer experience, we're helping them be more effective and efficient in the way that they deploy their own staff (associates) and the way they motivate, train, measure and reward them,” he said.

Edsall says that the combination of “business savvy and deep tech expertise, when brought together with the business problem or an opportunity that Kroger is faced with, is when the magic happens”.

“We’re doing plenty of that over the next couple of years; with 5G networks and exploitation on cloud, reshaping the way those applications work and how reliable they are. We're also helping Kroger think through how to get business advantages from artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics”, said Edsall.

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READ THE FULL KROGER TECHNOLOGY DIGITAL REPORT HERE