The price is right, and on time at Nisa-Today's
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.
 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.
The solution
Nisa-Today's wanted to cut down the time it took to process these core activities so 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.
- 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, and many hundreds of new members can be added.
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For further information please contact:
Enabler (a Wipro Company)
Cosima Wagner
Direct line: 0118 902 2476
www.enabler.com |
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