The client's story
The natural grocery chain has grown from a single road-side fruit stand almost a century ago, to becoming one of the largest health-focused grocery retailers in the country, with 360 stores located in 23 states, 35,000 employees, and $6.5 billion in net sales.
Facing decreasing traffic and sales due to the pandemic, the company realized it needed to improve the quality of and access to its data to make faster, more intelligent-based decisions to increase customer loyalty and remain competitive.
The problem
When the company came to Blueprint, they had outdated visibility into their data, spanning across multiple channels, which greatly affected their day-to-day operational excellence. From an organizational perspective, analysts were battling a time-consuming backlog of tasks simply due to the siloed data and exhaustive timeline it took to obtain relevant insights and provide clear visualization for the internal stakeholders.
This siloed data structure not only affected their ability to solve inventory management issues and improve customer loyalty marketing in a timely manner, it also prevented key employees from launching new projects and strategic initiatives.
After an initial vendor was unable to provide the necessary real-time insights to make impactful supply chain and marketing decisions, Blueprint took over the project.
The Blueprint Way
Reduced reporting time from hours/days to seconds/minutes
Moving the company’s data from a Multi-Model/One-Report implementation to a One-Model/Multi-Report central data model eliminated numerous manual tasks. By consolidating 17 of the existing Tableau reports into 10 focused reports using Power BI, the company was able to utilize intuitive virtual dashboards that connected to real-time data enabling decision makers to take action at business speed.
The Power BI reports show:
- Out of stock inventory
- Customer behavior (new and repeat)
- Items not found
- Orders
- Product SKU’s changing at region/district/store
- Store Launch Schedules
- Pickup Performance Metrics report – This is about Shoppers, and metrics around their shopping experience
- Store Sales-increased and decreases in sales
Having dashboards load instantly with this information instead of spending hours analyzing the data manually had reverberating effects across the company, allowing them speed to market insights that improved their supply chain issues and customer loyalty.
I am so impressed that Blueprint is speaking to us about relevant use cases. We are not typical retail, so we love that you speak to us in a way that shows you understand that.
Increased in-store sales by 10% with customer loyalty program
By creating reports and dashboards that gave the grocery chain real-time data on customer behavior and individual shopper experiences, the company was able to get a true view of the Customer to improve loyalty and brand affinity.
With a complete digital view of how their customers interact with the store, the chain was able to properly define marketing cohorts, enact the use of geospatial and geographical capabilities to further their outreach effectiveness and target future and existing customers effectively.
With this data they were also able to optimize their website and app-user experience, with personalized promotions and coupons based on users’ past purchases and interactions. This increased in-store sales by 10%, a three year goal that Blueprint made happen in 90 days.
Blueprint is talented. They have the great ability to help the client connect the dots and can do so with various stakeholders, meeting each one at their level. They really take the time to earn trust and explain things so that we can understand them.
Exceeded financial goal to reduce store sizes by 23%
By leveraging the new data model Blueprint created, the company was able to make intelligent business decisions surrounding inventory management, customer loyalty, marketing and operations. The company was also able to financially reduce their real estate by 25% after 90 days of working with Blueprint.
Impact
- Reduced data reporting time from hours to minutes
- Justification for 25% reduction in real estate
- Increased in-store sales by 10% with customer loyalty program
