Improving Loyalty Marketing and Promotional Spending
Andronico’s Market is a chain of supermarkets throughout Northern California. The ten Andronico’s stores serve a mostly upscale clientele in an area that radiates out from San Francisco to Los Altos.
Stores average about 40,000 square feet with sales areas of about 29,000 square feet. They are geared toward the gourmet shopper and each store features a wide range of specialty grocery items, out of the ordinary produce and herbs, full-service meat and fish, fresh flowers, a deli with freshly cooked foods, kitchen gadgets and tableware.
Challenge
Andronico’s business users need insight into what’s selling, what needs to be discounted, and who is responding to the latest marketing campaigns in time to respond to market changes and make informed business decisions.
Getting access to timely, relevant data from their on premise business intelligence solution and other systems was time consuming and cumbersome. It required exporting data from back office systems and financial applications, then importing it into a common format like Excel that could be manipulated and shared.
Even with all this work, many business users didn’t trust the data’s accuracy and ended up guessing what they thought the data meant. “I had to constantly validate Excel against the raw transactional data,” said Carey Seone, Store Systems Manager. “Improving business results requires the ability to gain deeper insight into any aspect of the business when necessary and compress decision cycles.”
What Andronico’s needed was a business intelligence solution that could:
-
Aggregate disparate data and create a common platform for analytics
-
Securely distribute data across the business and enable collaboration
-
Deliver self-service, ad-hoc reporting and analysis without reliance on IT
-
Provide fast time to value and reduce BI operating costs immediate adoption
Solution
Andronico’s faced a classic BI problem: a time consuming, inflexible and error-prone process with limited data analysis capabilities set amidst a sea of dispersed data, static reports and too many Excel spreadsheets. Moreover, the IT department wanted to get out of the report writing business and focus on higher value activities.
IT's goal was to develop one reliable source for reporting and deploy easy to use yet powerful BI tools throughout the business – without burdening IT. Andronico’s CIO decided to think differently about the chain's BI tool strategy, then realized cloud-based alternatives could provide the affordable, low risk and fast time-to-value solution they needed.
In a matter of weeks, the PivotLink Business Intelligence Platform allowed the company to aggregate data from its Retail.net, inventory, pricing, order guides, financial, sales and other systems for right-time reporting and analysis. Because PivotLink is so easy to use, business users across the company are now empowered to slice and dice information any way they want and create reports that make day-to-day decisions making more effective.
Results
Seone says the transition from Andronico's on-premise reporting solution to PivotLink was easy, “Once the data was transferred from the other systems and we set up daily loads, it was just a matter of getting the users acclimated.”
Now the company’s buyers, accounting, operations, store managers and even executive assistants are using the solution. “Analysis that took users days of inputting data into an Excel spreadsheet to achieve now takes hours with PivotLink.”
A major benefit to Andronico’s is that there is one version of the truth – so everyone has a more accurate picture of how the business is operating.
“People are looking at the data every day to make decisions,” said Seone. “For example, we do an everyday value promotion where we take products and lower the price. We can see exactly how that promotion is performing to make decisions about future promotions.”
It is this accuracy that Seone says is critical to retail businesses. “PivotLink is a great tool for retail companies that need reliable, near real-time visibility into their business.”
Benefits
-
Centralized repository for all reporting and analysis
-
Better answers with more analysis behind them
-
Improved loyalty marketing and promotional spending
-
Reduced IT overhead by 20 percent through self-service capabilities
