Blue Yonder and Giant Eagle has announced that the two companies are working together to digitally transform the multi-format retailer’s space management capabilities. The project involved the successful implementation of Blue Yonder’s category management SaaS solution and was overseen by Plantensive, a Blue Yonder partner. With rapidly changing consumer behavior, supply chain disruptions and inflation, retailers need to make faster decisions to attract and retain customers. Blue Yonder’s solutions address this gap in retail operations, providing the capability to automate many of these product decisions.
Giant Eagle, Inc. is a leading provider of food, fuel, and pharmacy with more than 470 stores throughout western Pennsylvania, north central Ohio, northern West Virginia, Maryland, and Indiana, operating under the Giant Eagle, Market District, and GetGo brands. Its supermarkets each have between 20,000 to 60,000 SKUs, while its convenience stores have more than 3,500 SKUs. The retailer was looking to automate and improve its category management capabilities from manual processes, so it turned to Blue Yonder.
Thanks to Blue Yonder, Giant Eagle has been able to:
- Formalize the category management practice, giving it executive visibility and aligning it with the overall business.
- Keep strategy and execution as closely aligned as possible and remove silos to allow teams to move from analysis to refinement to execution much quicker.
- Bring together SKU data from across all its brands into this truly enterprise-wide solution.
- Allocate space more strategically thanks to data and analytics, improving the customer shopping experience.
- Gain better control over the master planogram, which means fewer stockouts, improving the health of the business and allowing staff to implement changes quickly.
“We needed a solution to help improve our customer-shopping and decision-making journey,” said Scott McNeely, vice president, Merchandising Planning, Operations and Analytics, Giant Eagle. He explained that planograms are an essential way to design and align retail space, which impacts other store-related decisions. “We knew Blue Yonder offered the right capability to meet our needs. The automation capability of Blue Yonder’s category management solution has allowed our staff to refocus how they work, spending time on more valuable things like building stronger partnerships, elevating our space management strategy, and applying analytics to decisions.”
Blue Yonder’s category management solution allows Giant Eagle to optimize layouts across stores, optimizing space and reducing out-of-stocks, both of which work to increase customer satisfaction. This solution leverages SaaS, which is scalable, reliable, and also sets up users to take advantage of new solution innovations as soon as they are available. Giant Eagle is currently evaluating Blue Yonder’s clustering capabilities.
“As a Blue Yonder Category Management solutions provider, partnering Blue Yonder with Giant Eagle was imperative given the ever-changing landscape in retail,” said Dan Luttner, managing partner, Plantensive. “We are excited to see the impact this Blue Yonder solution has on their business. We will continue supporting Giant Eagle throughout this rollout, and we look forward to seeing how we can assist in their future supply chain technology projects.”
“Giant Eagle was looking for a category management and planogram strategy that could adjust as customer preference and demand changed,” said Vince Beacom, senior vice president, Retail, Blue Yonder. “With Blue Yonder’s category management solutions, they can build and maintain store-specific planograms to drive more efficiency for their planners and staff to better meet these changing needs.”
