Why robots don’t mean redundancies for MAF Retail’s Saudi operations

And Hani Weiss told Arabian Business, far from losing staff, the company is looking to double its employee numbers in the kingdom over the next five years, with a planned investment of over half-a-billion Saudi Riyals.

Earlier this month MAF Retail launched an automated fulfilment centre at its Carrefour store in Jeddah’s Al-Sulaymaniyah. The digitised storage picking facility automates managing orders, reducing the processing time by up to 50 percent.

However, Weiss insisted the human touch would always be a vital part of the company.

He said: “We will always have opportunities to redeploy our staff to do much more important jobs for our customers. I don’t want our employees to do stuff that can be automated. I want them to be there for our customers in the service area, to become their representative, to advise them.”

Tally Robots

According to the World Economic Forum, by the end of 2022 almost 50 percent of the world’s workforce will either need to be upskilled or reskilled.

“This is a global thing that needs to be done because what brought us here will not take us there, we need to change the way we are working, we need to change our mindset, our culture and use automation and digitisation in order for the human to do better jobs mainly on the customer experience,” added Weiss.

Spanning an area of 3,000 sqm, the centre can fulfil 2,000 orders per day, transported by 100 chilled vans.

MAF Retail currently operates 21 stores in Saudi Arabia, with a further six set to open across the country before the end of this year, as well as up to six more automated fulfilment centres in the next five-to-six years, including one scheduled to open in the capital Riyadh next year.

The company boasts a workforce of 2,636 employees in the kingdom, 40 percent of whom are Saudi nationals and, from that, 35 percent are Saudi females – the new centre in Jeddah comprises 100 colleagues, including five Saudi female supervisors.

Weiss said: “What we are planning in the coming four-to-five years is to double again our size by moving to 40 stores. This will help us to generate another at least 3,000 jobs for the people, plus with the five-to-six micro-fulfilment centres that we’re going to open, this will also help us to generate 600 new jobs.”

Hani Weiss, chief executive officer of Majid Al Futtaim Retail

He also revealed “huge investment” plans, which includes almost SAR400m spent on new physical stores – they currently have a presence in nine cities, including Riyadh, Jeddah, Khobar, Dammam, Medina, Jouf, Makkah; as well as between SR100-150m to be invested in new micro-fulfilment centres.

“Overall we are talking about more than half-a-billion (riyals) in the coming four years,” he said.

As a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic, Carrefour KSA witnessed a 285 percent increase in online sales in 2020, leading the company to accelerate its online growth plans – MAF opened its biggest online fulfilment centre in Riyadh and activated nine stores to handle online orders.

Weiss said: “Globally, post-pandemic, or since the pandemic took place, we’ve seen a double digit growth in the online sales as part of the total sales. It proves that we have a huge opportunity to grow this business in the future.”