Case Studies

A large regional grocery store chain with over 600 stores throughout the East Coast and New England, and several billion dollars in annual revenues.

This retailer had issues ranging from a generally incomplete or inaccurate item file and pricebook.  Part of the problem was that each store was responsible to create and update its own item file and pricebook for the category.  Over 80% of the stores were not performing this task consistently.  As a result, neither the store nor headquarters were able to make heads or tails of the data captured, and in many cases, Market Inventory personnel responsible to assess and prevent shrink entirely avoided reviewing this category out of  lack of information and frustration, creating an opportunity for mischief and fraud by employees aware that the category represented a “black hole” 

    •    iControl completely rebuilt the item file and pricebook for the entire chain, store by store, then centralized the process of updating both so that stores no longer had any need to take individual action to maintain either

    •    iControl began sending weekly reports to market inventory specialists, alerting them to the overall results of their respective territories, as well as stores that were flagged for underperformance

    •    Market Inventory Specialists from the chain began to bring the iControl reports to weekly field conference calls with store managers, generating great awareness and focus. According to one market inventory specialist at the chain, “The detail reports [from iControl] showing Newspaper GM Units scanned vs POS scans are very helpful . . . I use them in my weekly notes and then discuss on my conference calls with the stores [which is] helping in increasing the scan rate.”

    •    The retail sales in the category for the chain rose from $10.4 million to $16 million in under 6 months; at least two-thirds of the gain was attributable to sales previously not properly handled by the store. 

    •    Over $400,000 per year in losses due to pricing errors attributable to outdated information in the pricebook was eliminated
 

iControl continues to send the reports to the Market Inventory Specialists on a weekly basis, and participates in training and educating store personnel to maintain the results acheived and continue to build upon them.