Brookshire Aims for Shopper Focus With New Systems

BOBBIE KATZ

Las Vegas — Brookshire Grocery Co., Tyler, Texas, expects its adoption next April of an expansive suite of retail applications from SAP, including category management, to help the company become more shopper-focused, said executives familiar with the implementation.

According to Paul Christman, executive vice president, Winston Weber and Associates, Memphis, Tenn., a category-management consulting firm working with Brookshire, Brookshire's legacy technology had too many limitations and “was not positioned to touch the shopper.”

Christman discussed the Brookshire project Oct. 23 in a presentation at the SAP Retail Forum '07, held at the Bellagio Hotel here. He was joined by Randy Duke, senior vice president and category management officer for Brookshire.

In what it dubs “Champions Phase 2,” Brookshire is implementing SAP for Retail solutions, which include buying, pricing, category management, forecasting, scorecards, merchandise assortment planning and replenishment. The go-live date is set for April 8, 2008.

Brookshire, which operates 155 stores, has already successfully completed implementation of “Champions Phase 1,” which comprises the SAP Business Suite family of financial and human resources applications. SAP's POS Data Management application was also implemented in 2007.

Brookshire has thus marked itself as one of the few food retailers committed to a single-vendor enterprise resource planning (ERP) approach to technology, rather than a more conventional best-of-breed strategy. (See “Ahold, Brookshire Take ERP Approach to IT,” SN, Oct. 8.)

With SAP for Retail applications, Brookshire intends to enhance the shopping experience through the shopper-centered alignment of strategies, tactics and execution.

The evolution to a shopper-centric model, said Christman, is a major paradigm shift that will “shift the focus beyond the category to the aisle, department and total store and restore the emphasis on being good merchants.”

It will also enhance the ability to execute merchandising programs and “shift the collaboration between trading partners toward actionable shopper insights,” Christman said. Most retailers, he noted, “do not believe that suppliers are providing sufficient shopper insights.”

Duke also noted the importance of customer data. The Champions Phase 2 project will include “amplifying the customer voice” by collecting and analyzing customer-specific data from multiple sources, he said.

In the cost control area, the goal is to reduce SG&A (selling, general and administrative) costs and to provide Brookshire executives with the tools necessary to maintain efficient inventory levels, said Duke. Along with that is the aim of providing for easy correlation of category plans to financial budgets.

Among the goals in efficient organization is to support change management and training initiatives that minimize risks and maximize productivity, as well as providing Brookshire vendors with accessibility to information necessary to drive sales.

Duke identified many implementation best practices that have been and continue to be critical to success. Among them are selecting the best people in the organization and dedicating them full-time to the project, as well as working with an experienced and knowledgeable integration partner, in this case Deloitte.