Robinsons Supermarket, a subsidiary of Robinsons Retail Holdings Inc. (RRHI), is the second largest multi-channel retailer in the Philippines. Its systems must support six business segments with nearly 1,600 stores and over 1,900 franchised stores.
Success Story
Robinsons Supermarket
Merchandise Management, Space Planning
Robinsons Supermarkets keeps customers at the heart of their business
The company
The business challenge
Supermarket retailing is a highly dynamic industry. Hundreds of products are introduced and delisted week to week. To remain relevant to their customers, Robinsons knew they must always ensure they offer the right products, at the right place, at the right time and at the right price. As Robinsons’ business grew, venturing into new regions and adding new segments and sub-formats, their manual processes and legacy systems became too inefficient and limiting.
Expansion into new regions and formats created a need to segment their customer base for customized and engaging shelf assortments. Targeted expansion to different regions in the Philippines, coupled with strong organic growth and the addition of three new sub-formats, increased the volume of transactions, vendors, SKUs and database records Robinsons must manage.
“Not only that, the value of the transactions increased as well. Our customers also evolved to become highly segmented, with each segment having different demands to be met.” — AVP for Merchandising
The solution
Robinson decided to implement a current version of Blue Yonder’s merchandise management capabilities, having first worked with Blue Yonder 15 years previously. Robinsons can now create purchase orders with larger amounts and quantities to cater to their growing requirements, attach unlimited attributes to SKUs and stores to help provide a deeper analysis of data and assign longer reference series to transactions to avoid constant purging of records. The system has also provided improved back-end processing of data and transaction management capabilities, allowing Robinsons to focus on their customers.
“As the supermarket is a non-discretionary format that serves the daily needs of our customers, we have to ensure that the products that meet these needs are always available on shelf. An efficient and equipped supply chain process enabled us and our vendors to address the persistent challenge of on-shelf stock availability.”
–Robinsons Supermarket President and COO
Optimizing multiple formats
Supporting multiple store formats while catering to local customer preferences was a challenge for Robinsons. They now use Blue Yonder’s space planning capability to create generic planograms for each format which are incorporated with display guidelines to help stores execute proper and equitable display of appropriate assortments on-shelf.
Increased productivity
As their business has grown and as customer needs have evolved, their focus has shifted to sustaining growth and meeting the needs of customers and vendors. The new technology and automation have allowed associates to complete activities faster, smarter and more effectively.
“We have increased the productivity of our stores and that of our associates, and improved the efficiency of our processes. We now have more time to spend on business building initiatives together with our vendors.” — Regional Operations Manager
Solution benefits
Improved on-shelf availability tailored to each format and customer segment. Increased productivity through reduced manual tasks and faster, smarter decision-making. Improved data analysis and transaction management to support growth and regional expansion.
“At Robinsons Supermarket, we consider Blue Yonder as one of our core solutions. By tapping into their solution’s transactional and database management capabilities, we streamlined our processes, increased our productivity, enhanced our understanding of our customers and did our operational tasks and activities more efficiently. Simply put, Blue Yonder helped us achieve our mission of putting our customers at the heart and center of our business.”
–Information Systems Delivery Manager
