H.J. Heinz Enhances Visibility One Store at a Time

H.J. Heinz, the market leader in sauces, soups, beans and kids meals, is driving on-shelf availability and visibility in its UK business -- one store at a time.

In 2007, Heinz decided to rationalize its teams of field sales representatives responsible for supporting in-store objectives into a single team. But to maximize the impact of the consolidated team, Heinz wanted to identify stores with the greatest sales opportunity and focus on driving products with the greatest sales potential.

Data Delivery

Heinz  turned to analytics partner Retail Insight to identify out of stocks, non-compliant promotions and inactive distribution in each individual store. On behalf of Heinz, store-level sales data is processed for every major UK grocery store every day. The size of the prize is calculated for each individual store and this in turn drives the field coverage plan: outlets with the greatest lost sales value are visited with the highest frequency by Heinz representatives.

Processing volume and value sales for 600 products to derive availability and compliance in more than 1,200 stores means handling more than 1.5 million data points each day. Retail Insight helps to cut through this data jungle to provide each field rep with daily store-level exception reporting on availability and compliance, which drives productive conversations with store management. Store staff responds well to data-based action plans that are specific to their store and in-store fundamentals are seeing significant improvement as a result.

Platform for ROI

But Heinz still wanted to squeeze more out of the bottle.

"We wanted to know which in-store actions are the most
successful in driving sales," explains Heinz Retail Operations Manager Jemma Blaylock. "It's the type of intentional learning that drives ever-improving results and maximizes our return on investment."

So when field representatives take an action in store (fix a missing shelf ticket, resolve an inaccurate bookstock or secure an extra display) that action is recorded and reported back to Retail Insight. Every in-store action is assessed to identify the incremental sales generated, the cost to deliver, and the resulting return on investment (ROI). Field reps are measured by ROI delivered and Heinz knows which actions drive growth -- and which don't.

The results Heinz has achieved through the program are considered impressive. In the last year, Heinz products have seen major improvements in on-shelf availability, compliance to distribution and rates of promotional implementation.

The bottom-line sales impact of the program is measured against a representative control group and shows the power of the program -- delivering a significant increase in sales at a compelling ROI.