Giant Eagle transforms category, space management
Giant Eagle Inc. is automating and improving its category and space management capabilities from manual processes.
The regional food, fuel and pharmacy retailer is utilizing the Blue Yonder SaaS-based category management solution in an effort to automate product decisions in the face of challenges such as supply chain disruption and inflation.
Operating more than 470 locations across western Pennsylvania, north central Ohio, northern West Virginia, Maryland, and Indiana under the Giant Eagle, Market District and GetGo brands, the retailer’s stores each have between 20,000 to 60,000 SKUs, while its convenience stores have more than 3,500 SKUs.
Utilizing Blue Yonder technology (implemented with oversight from Plantensive), Giant Eagle has been able to obtain executive visibility into category management and align it with the overall business. The retailer is also now able to remove organizational silos and bring together SKU data from across all its brands.
In addition, the retailer says it can allocate space more strategically utilizing data and analytics, improving the customer shopping experience. Other benefits include gaining better control over the master planogram, resulting in fewer stockouts. Currently, Giant Eagle is evaluating Blue Yonder’s clustering capabilities.
“We needed a solution to help improve our customer-shopping and decision-making journey,” said Scott McNeely, VP, merchandising planning, operations and analytics, Giant Eagle. He explained that planograms are an essential way to design and align retail space, which impacts other store-related decisions. “We knew Blue Yonder offered the right capability to meet our needs. The automation capability of Blue Yonder’s category management solution has allowed our staff to refocus how they work, spending time on more valuable things like building stronger partnerships, elevating our space management strategy, and applying analytics to decisions.”
“Giant Eagle was looking for a category management and planogram strategy that could adjust as customer preference and demand changed,” said Vince Beacom, senior VP, retail, Blue Yonder. “With Blue Yonder’s category management solutions, they can build and maintain store-specific planograms to drive more efficiency for their planners and staff to better meet these changing needs.”
“As a Blue Yonder category management solutions provider, partnering Blue Yonder with Giant Eagle was imperative given the ever-changing landscape in retail,” said Dan Luttner, managing partner, Plantensive. “We are excited to see the impact this Blue Yonder solution has on their business. We will continue supporting Giant Eagle throughout this rollout, and we look forward to seeing how we can assist in their future supply chain technology projects.”
[Read more: Giant Eagle lowering prices on 800 items — for a limited time]