Planning solutions result in inventory reductions for Spanish grocery retailer
Barcelona, Spain — November 7, 2003 — Spanish grocery retailer Caprabo has completed the first phase of its deployment of retail-specific solutions from supply chain specialist i2 as part of an initiative to make the business more efficient and offer better customer service.
Caprabo has more than 500 supermarket stores and 30 gas stations, with a workforce of more than 15,000 people. The company ended its last fiscal year with revenues of $2.3 billion.
The retailer has gone live with three core solutions from i2's Merchandise Planning suite, including Merchandise Planner, Demand Planner and Replenishment Planner.
i2 said that Merchandise Planner is helping the entire Caprabo organization to develop more accurate budgets by integrating and managing business, financial and departmental plans. Additionally, the solution provides visibility of performance against plans and assists in assortment planning.
Demand Planner is a forecasting tool that is designed to improve customer service levels across all product categories. It allows Caprabo to tailor forecasts to a product's characteristics, such as fast- or slow-moving items, promotional lines or new product introductions.
Replenishment Planner, combined with Demand Planner, uses the forecasts to calculate optimized stock requirements for more than 7,000 items in three distribution centers (DCs) in the Catalonia and Madrid region, more than 60 percent of Caprabo's business. Based on these forecasts, the system automatically generates purchase orders and builds more complete truckloads for suppliers. This is designed to allow Caprabo to achieve the twin aims of reducing inventory and improving customer service levels.
Testing in the two Catalonia based DCs — Ciencas and Abrera — has produced inventory reductions of 8-20 percent. In addition, the planners, who had previously been using transaction systems, inventory reports and spreadsheets, have seen productivity increases by using Replenishment Planner, according to i2.
Caprabo is currently in the process of rolling out Replenishment Planner to all its distribution centers in Spain.
Caprabo has worked with IBM Business Consulting Services and i2 to implement the Merchandise Planner business model design and to integrate the i2 solutions with existing systems at the retailer.
"We are very pleased with the initial results of the implementation; expectations are being exceeded," says Xavier Argente, CEO of Caprabo. "Through the use of the i2 Retail solutions and IBM services, we expect to be able to give our customers better service and improve our business performance as we execute our plans to aggressively grow the business."
