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The price is right, and on time at Nisa-Today’s
09 July 2007
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Nisa-Today’s has cut the time taken to process price
changes, promotions and new stores by on average 150%,
enabling it to further enhance member loyalty and for
members in turn to boost their sales, by working with
international business and IT services company, Enabler
Wipro. The project is part of Nisa-Today's commitment to
continued innovation for its members. |
Background
Nisa-Today’s is the UK’s largest distribution and services organisation
for retail and wholesale companies. Its commercial objective is to negotiate
the lowest cost price of products and provide the most efficient supply chain
for its member companies, by strategically using their combined turnover powerbase.
In the buying group there are presently 674 Nisa retail members operating
over 5,000 stores and 300 Today’s wholesale companies with 320 depots.
The challenge
Nisa-Today’s wanted to grow its sales by introducing price changes much
more quickly. Its systems therefore needed to be able to process a higher
volume of price changes and other data changes such as ranging, promotions,
promotions ending, and new stores, each night. The main reason was the combination
of Price Changes multiplied by the Number of Catalogues (almost one per store),
that would represent millions of changes every night.
By making price changes, promotions and new products available on time in
the stores, Nisa-Today’s hoped to boost sales as well as member loyalty,
a particular issue in the convenience sector, where competitors vie for
retailers and there is less loyalty among members.
Solution
Nisa-Today’s wanted to cut down the time it took to process these core
activities so that data was available more quickly to change prices in
the stores. It also wanted to add value. For instance, it wanted to
continue to maintain a different price list for each store, which was
proving very demanding on systems. These regular activities were significantly
restricted by the lack of a sufficiently wide systems batch window in which
to process them.
Enabler Wipro’s recommended solution was to take pricing and other
activities away from the stores and create a smaller set of catalogues for
stores that shared characteristics. It realised that there were actually no
more than six different price lists, 10 surcharges, two VAT regions and
three temperatures for food logistics. The result of this approach would
be only 60 catalogues rather than thousands.
The project
Enabler Wipro was therefore commissioned to work at the heart of Nisa-Today’s
systems to make further improvements to the application infrastructure.
This involved managing and reducing data tables by removing closing stores,
those no longer trading, discontinuing items and inaccurate ranging configurations.
The project took four months from design through to final implementation.
This led to improved efficiencies by enabling Nisa-Today’s to move from
separate price catalogues per store to catalogues for groups of stores, a
reduction from several thousands to some dozens, reflecting price list,
surcharge, VAT region and currency of the stores.
Key to the change was the requirement that it should be invisible to the
Users, who suffered no change to the Business Process whatsoever. The Price
Catalogue Groups are automatically managed in the background by back office
systems, but are still based on the Surcharges and Price Lists that the users
have always maintained.
Benefits
Nisa-Today’s has reported a range of benefits following the implementation
of the catalogue changes.
Ranging changes equating to more than 10 million records have been reduced
to less than three million, and are now processed in less than four hours,
where previously this would have taken up to three times as long as that.
All prices can now be changed over a weekend.
There are now no restrictions on numbers of promotions starting and ending
at the same time.
Some members have the capability to choose (on-line) their own assortment.
The system is more scalable, many hundreds of new members can be added.
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on average 150%, enabling it to further enhance member loyalty and for members in
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