CASE STUDY: GREENCORE
How Greencore boosts incremental sales in three months with Qlik.
Greencore - www.greencore.com
Delivered first application for testing and review within days of the initial decision to go ahead.
PROJECT INFORMATION
In 2011, Greencore acquired convenience food supplier Uniq Prepared Foods. Uniq derived more than half its revenue from supplying leading retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S), with the Northampton site being lead supplier for sandwiches and wraps. Jenny Thompson, Commercial Executive for Greencore Northampton, says: “Previously, we used Microsoft Excel reports to monitor sales performance, which involved complex pivot tables and took hours of work to produce. We were able to deliver only weekly reporting from the M&S electronic point of sale (EPOS) system on key performance indicators.”
“As a result, we were often slow to react if a particular product wasn’t selling well in a particular store. We had no real-time information on which were the best-selling lines, so stores in some areas ran out of stock and in others they had to throw away food.” Greencore Northampton saw an opportunity to deploy business discovery software for daily and weekly reporting on sales performance. The aim was to reduce waste and improve the availability of sandwiches and wraps at M&S stores in the UK.
THE RELATIONSHIP
Catalyst delivered its first application for testing and review within days of the initial decision to go ahead, which gave Greencore Northampton the confidence that it was making the right choice. It also provided fully certified training services for users and super users. The initial project supported the commercial team with the replication of the existing Excel weekly reports and analysis completed on this data. Once the power of Qlik was outlined, the second stage involved moving the performance management of a relatively small segment of the category—wraps.
CHALLENGES SOLVED
- Instead of 68% availability of wraps, we’re now recording daily averages of around 88%, which in turn means improved sales and lower waste for M&S
- Ability to access the real-time data in an easy-to-use format
- Daily reporting on sales of wraps at M&S faster, easier, and more flexible.
- Commercial team can now easily access information on a self-service basis.
- Integration of sales and financial dashboards enables the commercial team to incorporate financial data into its sales performance figures, and help the finance team analyse profitability more effectively.
- Inclusion of historical data offers us greater insight.
THE IMPROVEMENTS
"Qlik has changed my working life. If I want to know why a product isn’t selling, I can get the answer in seconds instead of waiting hours. Other team members are now also less reliant on me to produce reports because they can do it themselves."