Working Together

More and more, manufacturers and retailers need to work together to streamline the supply chain. Advanced technologies and business processes are key necessities to guarantee a lucrative collaboration. In recognition of this increasingly important issue, Consumer Goods Technology presented the Collaborative Trading Partner Award to the one CG firm that demonstrated outstanding achievement in a collaborative relationship. Well-known food manufacturing company General Mills, along with its collaborative retail partner Ingles, took this award home from the 2003 Consumer Goods Technology Conference for the significant effort they made toward a painless, simple and leading-edge collaboration process.

Collaboration Is Born

Ingles Markets Inc. operates 208 regional supermarket chain stores in western North Carolina, western South Carolina, northern Georgia, eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia and northeastern Alabama. The stores operate mostly under the Ingles name, although a few operate as Best Food and Sav-Mor. These supermarkets offer a full line of food items and specialty departments such as delicatessens and bakeries.

When strolling through the aisles of an Ingles supermarket, a customer will most-likely encounter an extensive line of General Mills consumer packaged goods products, including a number of bakery products sold through Ingles' Bakery Department.

In the years of operation before 2002, Sean Roberts, marketing manager, In Store Bakery, General Mills, maintained weekly data in a Microsoft Access database and ran weekly queries, which he then downloaded into Excel-based weekly reports. This process proved to be time-consuming for General Mills, with a significant amount of manual effort required any time Ingles' existing product segmentation structures changed or when the store district alignment was modified.

A First Step Towards Change

Sometime during the calendar year 2002, Sean Roberts decided to convert General Mills outdated Microsoft Access and Excel systems to a more tech-savvy reporting system, recognizing that converting store bakery department data in a timely and efficient manner would most likely provide better management and business insight for both companies.

Based on Roberts' new business strategy, General Mills selected and implemented a DataAlchemy-based reporting system designed by Bristol Technology. The technology enables collaborate analysis of Ingles' weekly bakery store level data. The DataAlchemy suite also correlates data sources, providing consumer goods manufacturers and retailers with the ability to design best-practice analytical presentations and distribute them to field users, channel partners or trade partners via Microsoft PowerPoint or the Web.

Using DataAlchemy analytics, Ingles' internal data systems provide weekly store level data on approximately 1,000 bakery SKUs sold in the Ingles Bakery Department throughout the Ingles chain. While it is important to understand individual item performance, Ingles recognized the importance from a management perspective of quickly understanding trends in its 20 categories and 16 product segments. In addition, it is key for Ingles to be able to provide performance information to the 10 district mangers that supervise more than 200 Ingles stores.

Realizing the Benefits
Both Ingles and General Mills have yielded benefits since General Mills' conversion to DataAlchemy's analytic capabilities from its former inefficient and lengthy processes. For one, less effort is required to ensure a quick turnaround of regular weekly reports. In turn, this regular weekly reporting allows quick modification of product segmentation structures.

Promotional activity has been enhanced since the implementation as well. Both companies are able to quickly access the impact of Ingles' weekly promotional activity in the week immediately following the promotion execution. DataAlchemy also provides follow-through tracking of promoted items to assess non-prompted performance in the weeks following promotional activity. From here, the collaboration partners can determine longer-term, promotional impact derived from their efforts.

General Mills is also able to quickly respond to changes in Ingles' store alignment whenever the retailer adjusts its store reporting hierarchy. Additionally, the use of DataAlchemy enhanced ad hoc analytic capabilities. As a result, the Ingles Bakery Buyer has requested specific drill down reporting that provides him with the data needed in order to conduct strategic discussions with Ingles' district managers.