OVERWAITEA FOODS is the leading British Columbia, Canada based supermarket retailer with 120 stores ranging from 15,000 to 60,000 sq ft and competes in the very competitive greater Vancouver area, urban and rural British Columbia as well as the Calgary market, selling up to 80,000 items in its largest stores. In recent years Safeway (USA) and Walmart have entered the major Overwaitea markets necessitating the company to sharpen its game and fight for customer loyalty in every possible way. Key to this competitive response has been the introduction of a UK software package, AMP2, from Retail Express which has delivered an Intelligent Merchandising software solution which is ‘game changing’ in its ability to plan and execute all aspects of pricing, promotions, advertising and marketing for the retailer.
Don Gamble, Overwaitea Director of IT and Architecture, said: “Retail Express has allowed us to get very granular in the management of our business with different prices and promotions to specific markets and customers; that was just a dream a couple of years ago now it’s a critical part of our success as a business.
“We have gone from two very similar banners (store formats) to five distinct banners, with their own customer focus, prices, promotions and marketing strategy. The extent of this change is really brought home by the change in our monthly advertising vehicles (flyers etc) which have grown from 13 to 37 per month, allowing us to target specific customer segments and neighbourhood markets, improving sales and profitability, whilst containing expenses.
“Retail Express has allowed us to take on the extra banners and the massive increase in ad vehicles, which were previously hugely labour intensive, and all this has been accomplished with the same staff and has kept us ahead of our competition when Walmart specifically has been at its most aggressive.
“Now we’re building on these major advances with the very powerful Forecasting, Simulation and Optimisation aspects of the Retail Express AMP2 product. When we tested these tools they embarrassed us when we compared their accuracy to our own existing forecasts.”
Wendell Scott, Overwaitea’s Vice President of Grocery Merchandising added: “Retail Express gave us the command and control tools that we required, now we couldn’t operate our business without it!”
Retail Express’s AMP2 product contains a new generation of science and analytical tools, which allows the Pricing and Category Manager to scientifically predict the outcome of mixing different promotion types (BOGOF, Loyalty Points, coupons etc), with promotional ads and regular prices to see what the direct and cross effects (elasticities) will be on each item in a category and the overall category sales and profits; and take action to correct any shortfall on the budget before going to market. AMP2 technology has been built and developed in the UK and now manages retail businesses in the USA, Canada and Europe.
Retail Express
Tel: 0113 244 4663
www.retailexpress.com
Comments are closed.