Grupo Merza: Improving Wholesale and Retail Insights with Analytic Solutions from SAP

Transcription

1 Grupo Merza: Improving Wholesale and Retail Insights with Analytic Solutions from SAP For groceries, beverages, pharmaceuticals, and more, Mexico counts on retail and wholesale giant Grupo Merza. Using the SAP HANA platform, SAP Lumira software, the SAP Sales Insights for Retail analytic application, and SAP Predictive Analysis software, Grupo Merza is speeding business insight to better understand what drives customers, sales, and a growing bottom line.

2 Company Grupo Merza Headquarters Michocan, Mexico Industries Retail Wholesale distribution Products and Services Food and beverage distribution, transportation and logistics, and financial services Employees 4,500 Web Site Partners SAP Services organization SAP s Data Science organization Cisco Systems Inc. BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION Objectives Analytic insight with little IT support Insight into market baskets across products, categories, and stores Less risk in wholesale customer loans Efficient, effective IT operations Deployed SAP Lumira software for data access from any source and the SAP HANA platform for real-time analysis Deployed the SAP Sales Insights for Retail analytic application to gain point-of-sale insight and SAP Predictive Analysis software to calculate loan risk Completed the implementation project in eight weeks Worked with SAP s Data Science organization to define a retail analytics strategy, optimize solutions, and train users Benefits Faster decisions with self-service data visualization Deeper insight into how promotions and product assortment impact market baskets Better loan policy for wholesale customers Read more With analytics tools from SAP, Grupo Merza is becoming a datadriven organization. With better data access and deeper point-of-sale insight, we can see who our customers are and what they want. Alfonso Cedillo, CIO, Grupo Merza 40% 70% Faster processing of transactional data and report delivery with SAP HANA 1 scorecard To track on-time payments on customer credit with SAP Predictive Analysis 4 weeks To deploy SAP Lumira without consulting services 2 / 6

3 Improving efficiency, insight, and customer relationships Consumers across Mexico know they can depend on high-quality groceries, beverages, pharmaceuticals, and more from Grupo Merza. One of the largest retail and wholesale distributors in the country, the group employs over 4,500 people to operate 19 wholesale distribution centers and 152 retail stores, including Merza, Mega Merza, Abarrotes Lagunitas, Cava del Duero, and Super Covi, across 30 Mexican states. To better manage its extensive and complex operations, Grupo Merza needed to improve analytical insight and efficiency across all departments from the stocking of warehouses to transportation and deliveries to crediting and invoicing. It was also important that the group maintain close relationships with and a deep understanding of its wholesale and retail customers. That meant using point-of-sale (POS) data to offer low prices and bulk buying promotions to wholesalers supporting commercial businesses and a convenient shopping experience and competitive prices to consumers in Grupo Merza stores. It also meant improving risk assessment when offering credit lines to wholesale buyers. To achieve these goals and become a more datadriven organization, Grupo Merza knew it needed a world-class IT platform and cutting-edge innovation, leading it to partner with SAP. 4,500 employees Across 19 wholesale distribution centers and 152 retail stores 3 / 6

4 Enhancing and speeding analysis of operations and customers To satisfy demand, Grupo Merza must accurately forecast and manage inventory, monitor and control distribution, and align operations. In the past, data was tracked and shared with spreadsheets, resulting in data silos by department and outdated information. To ease data access and sharing across the business and minimize reliance on IT, Grupo Merza deployed SAP Lumira software in just four weeks. But maintaining a competitive edge requires more than just making sure that shelves are stocked and operations are in sync. To succeed, a retailer must also know which offers and products are attracting which customers and why. In the past, Grupo Merza analyzed sales information by store or product category at the aggregate level. Working with SAP s Data Science organization, the group leveraged the SAP Sales Insight for Retail analytic application powered by SAP HANA to tap into valuable POS data and find out the impact of a given promotion, the products that attract the most profitable customers, and the drivers behind performance fluctuations by store and category. When selling to wholesale customers, a company like Grupo Merza often needs to extend credit a service that benefits customers, but which can also be risky for the business. The Data Science team showed Grupo Merza how to use SAP Predictive Analysis software powered by SAP HANA to develop predictive models that assess the credit worthiness of its wholesale customers and protect the bottom line. 4 / 6

5 Improving analytics to benefit customers and the bottom line With the SAP HANA platform, Grupo Merza is seeing up to 70% faster transactional data processing and report delivery. That means faster insight, decisions, and results. Business users at Grupo Merza can now access data from many sources using SAP Lumira, desktop edition. The simple interface allows graphical reports to be created online and shared across the group using SAP Lumira, cloud edition. By gathering data from wholesale customer accounts, SAP Predictive Analysis can determine if earlier loans were paid on time and establish a baseline to predict future behavior. A logistical model classifies accounts according to the likelihood of timely payments and then displays results on a customer scorecard. This allows Grupo Merza to better assess which customers will pay off credit and establish loan payment schedules accordingly. With SAP Sales Insights for Retail, Grupo Merza is using POS data to compute product affinities and market basket compositions, helping better identify drag-along items during promotional sales and improve product placement in stores. The group can identify and monitor its most important products, categories, and stores against key performance indicators (KPIs), such as distinct buyers, unit sales, profit, and revenue. It can also monitor how KPIs such as average basket size, number of items per basket, shopping frequency, and promotions impact each other and quickly perform root cause analysis of unexpected revenue changes. With this rapid insight, Grupo Merza can better understand the impact of each stock-keeping unit and adjust market basket size, promotions, and product assortments to increase revenue by giving customers exactly what they want. 5 / 6

6 Grupo Merza Tapping into IT innovation to improve business agility In the cut-throat world of retail, Grupo Merza knows that the right IT innovation will give it a competitive edge. To become a truly real-time business, it plans to deploy SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA. This will allow the group to combine transactions and analytics on a single in-memory platform, simplifying IT and reducing total cost of ownership. To provide its marketing and sales teams with the instant insight they need to help ensure effective and meaningful customer interactions, Grupo Merza also plans to deploy SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA. And, with the potential deployment of SAP HANA Cloud Platform, it will have instant access to the full power of SAP HANA, including flexible subscription models to build, extend, and run applications on SAP HANA in the cloud. Together with SAP, Grupo Merza will continue to nurture a deeper understanding of its business and its customers that will drive efficiency, improve customer relationships, and increase revenue both now and in the future. Studio SAP 37387enUS (15/04) 6 / 6

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