The Grocer Presents Booths’ New RELEX SCM system

The Grocer focused last month on RELEX’s work with the supermarket chain Booths.

RELEX began working with Booths late last year and the family-owned business, which has 29 stores across the North West of England, rolled out our systems in May.

The Grocer reported that Booths has cut spoilage of fresh products by around 20% and shrinkage across the board by 10%. According to the supermarket’s IT and e-commerce director, Andrew Rafferty, savings in that time already amounted to; “the business end of six figures.”

Rafferty told the newspaper that RELEX’s “real strength is in promotion management, and the tagging of events that you can then refer to in future, such as bank holidays.”

It was particularly important for Booths to be able to take weather, location and seasonal sales patterns into account because a number of its stores are in or close to major tourist destinations around the Lake District.

“We knew we weren’t great on seasonal sales and coming out of promotions,” Rafferty told The Grocer, “so that’s why we undertook a complete overhaul of our retail procedures and inventory based disciplines to re-engineer the whole process, and a big part of this included adopting RELEX.”

Booths keeps some 13-14,000 SKU’s in stock, a wide assortment for a mid sized chain, but an essential part of its strategy of differentiating itself from its larger competitors.

Rafferty also told the paper that implementing RELEX had helped bring about a ‘cultural change’ amongst their supply controllers. He said that their role had now evolved from being dominated by simple stock ordering to one where they are more akin to business analysts.

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