Natural Products Retail Chain Maximizes Profits and Resources with ECRS CATAPULT and Supplier Gateway Solutions
What specific benefits does the ECRS solution provide? What are some key features and functionality that make this a better fit compared to other systems you have installed in the past?
CATAPULT provides very detailed data and useful reporting functionality. The data we pull directly from CATAPULT reports helps us to determine item placement, item marketing, sales and promotions. Because we know what is selling and what our customers want, we know what to stock. We also use the system to efficiently run and monitor our discounting programs. Internal store processes and cashier monitoring are important aspects of effective business management. CATAPULT provides the tools needed to do this easily. I notice with each software update, the system gets better and better. It’s not a static solution and is constantly being updated with new functionality. Everything within CATAPULT is nice and consistent. This makes it simple for everyone. Cashier training is very easy and fast.
Explain how your stores are set up and what specific solutions (hardware and software) you are using.
We are using CATAPULT with multistore functionality. This provides the ability to manage all stores from one, centralized location. Nine of our stores have two (2) registers each and one (1) store has three (3) registers. We use the CATAPULT Appliance Server (CAS) to host each store. Over the past year, we have also started using the ECRS Supplier Gateway™ service combined with Auto-Replenishment functionality to manage our ordering and receiving processes.
Why did you decide to implement the ECRS Supplier Gateway service?
Basically, we didn’t want store managers spending all of their time ordering and receiving inventory. Implementing Supplier Gateway was justified to save time and company resources. We didn’t want to continue ordering based on what managers thought was selling or what we felt customers would probably like. There was too much subjective personal influence over inventory items that were going on our shelves. Orders are now based on actual, objective sales data and forecasting.
We brought in an ECRS retail consultant to look at hard data in order to arrive at a definite decision. We compared system generated orders to manually generated orders. The decision was made directly from those results. The majority of items being ordered were the same, but some of the items were off. We closely looked at why these specific items were different between orders. Some of the items included in the system generated order were simply missed by the store manager during inventory count. We had one manual order with an item that the system generated order did not include. After reviewing, we discovered there was only one of that item left in stock, but the item had been there for months and was not a product that sold and should therefore not be replenished. We ran a few of these trials and in every case the system generated order was more accurate.
What are some of the benefits to using Supplier Gateway and Auto-Replenishment?
Managing ten (10) stores with full-perpetual inventory is not easily achievable without CATAPULT and Supplier Gateway. Currently 70% of our inventory is ordered through Supplier Gateway from our two main suppliers. We could open another store just from what we saved in inventory related costs since implementing this system. Our inventory turns have improved greatly. In one Fruitful Yield store, total inventory was $320,649. This equaled $8.59 in inventory for each dollar in sales. Seven (7) weeks after installing Supplier Gateway and using Auto-Replenishment, and after an overall increase in sales, total inventory stood at $329,588 or $8.41 for each dollar of sales. This represents an overall improvement of 2.1% in the total inventory to sales ratio. For our main supplier, the inventory to sales ratio improved by 28.5% in seven (7) weeks. For this supplier, we began with $8.91 in inventory for each dollar of sales and ended with $6.37 in inventory for each dollar of sales.
The overall time savings has also been substantial. An order that used to take us 20-30 minutes to process now takes 30 seconds, and we are saving 40-50 hours per week in inventory receiving.
We have used the time savings to do other things like making sure all customers are greeted within 30 seconds of entering the store, working on background projects for inventory, improving floor selling techniques and closely monitoring customer activity to prevent theft. It also makes it so much easier for people to be out for vacation or sick leave.
Would you recommend ECRS retail automation solutions to other retailers?
Yes. It’s important that you take the time to choose the correct system and invest the resources to ensure everything is set up correctly. It takes time. Implementing a system like this doesn’t happen overnight, but the results are amazing. ECRS gave me my life back.
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