TYLER, Texas, Jan. 25 — Taking a customer-centric approach and delivering outstanding customer service have propelled Brookshire Grocery Company’s success story of growth and acquisitions since its founding in 1920. To better understand of the wants and needs of shoppers across its expanding operations at more than 150 Brookshire, Super 1 Food, Ole Foods and ALPS (Always Low Price Store) supermarkets in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, the company is further expanding its use of retail industry-specific software from SAP AG ( SAP).
Working together with SAP, Brookshire Grocery Company engaged in value engineering, a practice that uses industry benchmarking data from SAP to help companies understand their business challenges and how they can best address these issues with their existing IT investments and complementary solutions. As a result, the Texas-based company realized it needed to gain clearer insight from data spread across its operations in order to understand what drives shopper engagement, optimize pricing and run promotions more effectively. Today, Brookshire Grocery Company is building upon its existing relationship with SAP, expanding its footprint of SAP Business Suite software and SAP for Retail solutions with applications for promotion management, demand management and business intelligence (BI). Document access and archiving applications from SAP partner Open Text round out the new solution set.
“SAP understands how essential it is to our business to maintain both profitability and shopper satisfaction,” said Rick Rayford, president and chief executive officer, Brookshire Grocery Company. “Working with SAP, we evaluated our current IT landscape and new solution sets with an eye to maximizing our existing investments and determining the tools and functionality to gain deeper insight into the effectiveness of our store promotions and pricing strategies. The new set of SAP retail solutions will enable us to act quickly, flexibly and appropriately, and to execute creative campaigns that attract and retain shoppers.”
Optimizing Promotions and Prices
By streamlining promotion and pricing processes, retailers can achieve bottom-line savings and top-line growth. Brookshire Grocery Company plans to use the SAP Promotion Management for Retail application to help it develop and execute effective promotions, create accurate print media, and place and price merchandise correctly. Available as a stand-alone application or integrated with SAP Business Suite, the application is designed to enable retailers to optimally manage promotions and to adapt offers and promotion schedules based on deep understanding of emerging customer trends.
Facing increased competition, rapidly changing shopper demands, a volatile economy and thin margins, retailers cannot afford to make pricing mistakes. To address this key business demand, Brookshire Grocery Company is replacing its current price optimization solution from DemandTec with the SAP Price Optimization for Retail application to determine the best combination of competitive prices that will appeal to shoppers and also optimize profitability. The application helps retailers gain better insight into customers’ needs and deliver prices that meet financial objectives without sacrificing shopper expectations.
Boosting Business Insight
With multiple store brands frequented by different types of customers, Brookshire Grocery Company requires a detailed understanding of shopper demand to drive differentiating and localized assortments, pricing, and promotion strategies. Business intelligence (BI) solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio will enable Brookshire Grocery Company to offer one source of the truth for its merchandising, marketing and logistics staff to quickly make the right decisions.
Retail companies need to manage increasing amounts of information with a minimum amount of resources. The SAP Document Access application by Open Text and the SAP Archiving application by Open Text can improve access and management of all types of documents relating to transactions and processes run by SAP software. Brookshire will deploy the Open Text solutions to help reduce storage costs and optimize system performance. Third-party solution extensions such as the Open Text solutions are a dependable and trusted method for customers to make incremental IT investments that extend the core value of SAP application functionality, are easy to implement and address today’s business issues. SAP EcoHub provides an online marketplace that makes it easier for customers to discover, evaluate and buy these and other SAP solution extensions.
“SAP is committed to helping retailers run a clear enterprise,” said Bob McFarland, senior vice president and general manager of the U.S. Retail Organization, SAP America. “Our value engineering methodology helps retailers understand how to maximize their current investments and identify solutions that address unmet needs. With SAP and partner solutions, retailers can realize improved insight into their data so they can better understand their shoppers, increase store productivity, and reduce costs . The flexibility offered by SAP business solutions enables retailers to prepare for and capitalize on opportunities for profitable growth and competitive advantage.”
Source: SAP
