Founded in 1984, Alnatura is an organic supermarket chain that operates 139 supermarkets in 65 cities across Germany. The company offers 6,000 products and has annual revenues of $1.28 billion.
Success Story
Alnatura
Category Management, Space and Floor Planning
Alnatura grows revenues via optimal product placement
The company
The business challenge
Alnatura must manage tight space constraints, while maximizing availability and minimizing stock-outs. This is challenging because of the diverse local preferences across its markets. Fresh foods are especially difficult to manage profitably due to the high costs associated with waste.
The solution
The company turned to Blue Yonder to drive more automation, greater accuracy and localization, and increased efficiency for its category management and space planning activities.
“Our partnership with Blue Yonder enables Alnatura to implement extremely accurate, store-specific planograms that consider the available space, and the local conditions, to ensure the right product is on the right shelf at the right store — including the automatic addition of regional products. As a result, we’ve decreased out-of-stocks by 6% and overstocks by 29%.”
–Category Manager
Achieving a 4% increase in fresh foods revenues
“Blue Yonder’s solutions in category management, as well as space and floor planning, allow Alnatura to make more accurate space allocation decisions, even for challenging categories like fresh foods. By leveraging customer insights and robust analytics, Alnatura can maximize the productivity of available selling space to drive revenue growth, including a 4% increase in fresh food sales.”
Increased efficiency in both planning and store-level execution
“The planning automation provided by Blue Yonder has made it easier and faster to not only generate plans, but to execute them at the store level. Our Blue Yonder platform supports a connected category review process that optimizes our product assortments and shelf executions. The store-level adoption and execution of planograms has increased by 30% thanks to Blue Yonder.”
Meeting changing consumer needs with speed and accuracy
“Category management is the heart of all retail processes, especially in today’s fast-changing environment. So it’s critical for Alnatura to implement advanced technology that enables each store to meet its unique, local needs. As those needs evolve over time, Blue Yonder supports speed and responsiveness in adapting our plans.”
Solution benefits
Blue Yonder’s industry-leading space and floor solutions, including Planogram Generator, enable Alnatura to build store-specific, space-aware, consumer-centric planograms that meet local demand — with minimal inventory investments. Blue Yonder category management solutions leverage granular shopper insights, data analytics and automation to increase the accuracy and profitability of available space. Buying insights, store layouts, space and shelf availability are combined with category intelligence to grow shopper loyalty and increase basket size. Integrated within the Luminate Commerce portfolio, Blue Yonder solutions empower Alnatura’s category managers and space planners to work in collaboration, with complete visibility, resulting in increased revenues and availability.
“We chose Blue Yonder because customer centricity is a key driver for our daily operation and business. We have now established a process to support the local needs of shoppers, while improving our planogram planning efficiency and increasing store adoption of planograms by 30%. We look forward to further expanding our relationship with Blue Yonder as we continue to transform our stores and operations.”
–Category Manager
