Founded in 1903, Rexall Pharmacy is a leading pharmacy retailer with 377 stores across Canada. Known for its mission of "Caring for Canada's Health, one person at a time," Rexall stands as a cornerstone in the Canadian pharmaceutical industry, providing essential health services nationwide.
Success Story
Rexall Pharmacy
Space Management, Convenience Store Operations
Rexall Pharmacy transforms Store Operations with Blue Yonder
The company
The business challenge
Rexall faced significant challenges in managing its store space planning and floor planning due to outdated processes. Manual, ad-hoc reporting hindered effective space utilization and planning. This led to inefficiencies that affected project scaling and overall strategic planning for its storefronts. In addition, its IT team was looking for solutions to the time-consuming floor plan process – where AutoCAD plans had to be built and converted into floor plans across hundreds of stores.
The solution
Blue Yonder’s Floor Planning and Space Planning solutions helped Rexall automate and optimize its floor layouts and shelf allocations in its stores, providing data-driven insights and enhancing visibility into store operations. This enables strategic decision-making and streamlined category management. The AutoCAD Floor Planning Convertor (AFP) from Blue Yonder partner 3DVR Solutions, enabled automated conversion of native CAD data into Blue Yonder Floor Plans.
"Blue Yonder solutions have empowered Rexall, reducing our reliance on manual processes, and driving data-driven insights for better store reflows and strategic investments. It keeps our operations moving forward."
–Mow Shahrori, Senior Director, Application Services Rexall Canada
Rexall optimizes store operations with space planning and floor planning solutions
Rexall Pharmacy embarked on a transformative journey to optimize its store operations and meet the growing challenges of modern retailing. The initial hurdles included managing an influx of capital projects without a database of floor plans. This forced the pharmaceutical retailer’s teams to work outside its database to extract store details and buyer sales information from other systems. This reliance on external third-party software for rudimentary tasks like conversions and data cleanup led to challenges such as trying to juggle multiple maintenance, space change, and capital projects simultaneously, making it difficult to scale projects effectively. These capital projects included store renovations, expansions, new store openings, and closures.
Finding a new path forward
To address these challenges, Rexall chose Blue Yonder for its strong reputation and its solution’s capabilities and implemented its Space and Floor planning solutions. These solutions facilitated the transition to a centralized, data-driven approach, dramatically improving operational efficiency.
Blue Yonder Floor Planning was instrumental in identifying increased sales potential for capital projects, supporting the expansion of priority categories. Blue Yonder Space Planning helps Rexall identify all positions that an item has faced within a store, as well as redundant facings that are, in turn, decreased. And 3DVR AFP saved hundreds of hours in labor, increased accuracy and reduced delays in making Floor Plans operational.
Seamless implementation with a trusted partner
Rexall's collaboration with Blue Yonder partner Plantensive during the implementation phase was pivotal, offering crucial support and training to its teams, thus ensuring seamless integration and operationalization of the new solutions. Plantensive effectively assisted with behind-the-scenes fixes in real-time to ensure any issues were quickly addressed without impacting stores.
By transforming its operations with Blue Yonder solutions, Rexall not only enhanced its operational efficiency, but also identified new revenue opportunities. This successful journey highlights the critical importance of integrating advanced technology into retail operations, setting the stage for future growth and innovation.
“Automating the conversion of our CAD data directly into Blue Yonder has saved significant time and effort, generating a great return on investment. The speed in which our floorplans are generated frees up valuable resources and delivers the benefits of the Blue Yonder Floor Planning solutions sooner”
–Mow Shahrori, Senior Director, Application Services Rexall Canada
