NEW YORK — Key Food Stores Cooperative here has experienced a range of benefits as a result of implementing a business-intelligence (BI) system for its wholesale operations and its 118 independently owned supermarkets in the summer of 2009, according to Steve Pfirrman, director of IT for Key Food.
The BI system — called QlikView, from Qlik Technologies, Radnor, Pa., and implemented by Allegro BI, Murray Hill, N.J. — has helped Key Food and its retail owners manage a wide range of applications, including wholesale sales, vendor performance, financials, planograms, retail sales, product performance, shopper performance and shrink reduction, said Pfirrman, during an SN-hosted webinar yesterday with Qlik Technologies and Allegro BI. With regard to shopper performance, the system reveals "who are the best and most profitable customers and what are they buying," he said.
Users of the system include store managers, store owners, chain/division managers, business analysts, merchandisers and C-level executives. The system can "push content to the time-constrained or those who want to can drill down into the data," he said.
One chain merchandiser told Pfirrman that the system made it possible to address store business issues right away, compared to past processes that took six hours to a week, he said. "If they want to see a particular KPI, five minutes later it's there on the screen, live, ready for interrogation."
The system merges disparate data streams within Staten Island-based Key Food, including data for master items, invoices, customers and transactions.
