Scottish retail co-operative Scotmid has extended its contract with Retail Insight on the deployment of its cloud-based software WasteInsight. With the solution, the co-operative that operates around 280 retail outlets in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Northern England, was able to realise a notable enhancement in core metrics like sell-through and recovery of sales by intelligently managing mark-downs of products based on real-time data to avoid food waste in its 185 convenience stores.
In 2020, Scotmid had started to deploy Retail Insight’s tool in selected stores to test it. “We quickly saw that we were able to improve our overall margin and reduce food waste with the solution”, explains Allan Robertson, Programme Manager Innovation and Change at Scotmid, speaking with the Retail Optimiser. Shifting the process from manual decisions based on fixed rules to a dynamic mark-down pricing decision based on sales and inventory data enabled Scotmid to sell more and reduce the amount of goods that goes to landfill.
“Before working with Retail Insight, while we had a sound waste and markdown process, we didn’t have a detailed view on when the stores were carrying out their price reductions”, explains Allan Robertson. With WasteInsight, a new compliance report has also been introduced to help Regional Managers target specific areas of opportunities across their markdown windows.
Transparency enables continuous improvement
The transparency that comes with the solution is now a part of Scotmid’s fight against food waste. “We can now see what products have been reduced prior to being wasted and our category team have access to reporting to allow them to make informed decisions, delivering the best experience for our customers”, says Allan Robertson. The elaborated reporting that comes with the Retail Insight tool enabled Scotmid to conduct a continuous improvement on its processes decreasing the workload of price reduction through its teams in the stores and sell more and waste less at the same time.
Allan Roberston praises the Retail Insight team for its support and building a great working relationship: “We have a strong working partnership, the RI team and Scotmid category team meet regularly to continually improve and review the solution” The retail co-operative uses WasteInsight across its whole range and reduces prices wherever and when the data-based intelligence of the tool recommends it.
Meet Allan Robertson from Scotmid Coop at EuroCIS. He will present together with Florian Strecker from Retail Insight (Hall 10/E49)
on Tuesday 27 February from 14:20
on the Retail Technology Stage (Hall 10/F42).
Björn Weber, publisher of Retail Optimiser, will once again be moderating the Retail Technology Stage at EuroCIS this year.
