Prisma Peremarket, a well-known Estonian grocery retail brand operated by SOK, has been a staple in the Estonian retail landscape. With 13 stores and a product range of more than 70,000 SKUs, Prisma Peremarket takes pride in providing a smooth shopping experience for their customers. Juri Ljaskin, Prisma’s VP of Supply Chain, sat down with RELEX’s Amanda Oren to talk about their journey with RELEX, the benefits of the partnership, and their plans to leverage AI.
Transcript
Amanda Oren: Thank you so much for joining us today. For those of us who are not as familiar with Prisma, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your business?
Juri Ljaskin: Yes. Well, Prisma Peremarket is a grocery retailer based in Estonia. So we have a turnover of – well, sales of 250 million. We have eight hypermarkets and four supermarkets presently and one mini-market. And we are part of S-Group, which is a Finnish co-op, and their main business is grocery retail.
AO: What is your experience been with RELEX to Date?
JL: This is my second kind of, I’ve done two F&R implementation projects with RELEX. So, the second one was now in Estonia, Prisma Peremarket. So, I have total maybe I think over five years.
AO: What were the key value ads that you saw in RELEX that had driven our partnership?
JL: Our shared vision of how to make, in a nutshell, retail efficient. RELEX has a kind of a great deal of enthusiasm about the kind of topics they are working with.
So, we kind of share that passion. Then if we share that passion, you know, it’s always easy. Well, not always easy, but it’s, you know, it’s possible to find the way forward together. So I think that’s quite important.
AO: Are there any kind of metrics and KPIs that you’ve seen sort of tick up or change since implementing any of the RELEX projects?
JL: We had, like, consecutive maybe 18 months of shrinkage going down. As we get kind of the manual orders away, as we get the interference away, so to speak, so we get better and better results.
So then, obviously, we have to balance out a bit on the commerciality. Does that reflect the customer expectations and does that reflect what the store is expecting to offer the customer? So, there’s some kind of fine-tuning which needs to be done there.
AO: What do you see as being the next step in your partnership with RELEX, as well as your kind of overall strategy?
JL: Well, overall strategy, one of the pillars of that is operational effectiveness – is what I talk about on the panel today – so what I think many retailers in Europe are now pursuing. And we see RELEX, you know, as part of that journey, if you will. So, we are looking at the moment, looking into expanding our cooperation in several areas.
So, vision-wise, I think we share this kind of platform of connectedness of different solutions so that they form kind of an end-to-end process and ecosystem.
AO: How do you anticipate leveraging both AI and ML in your plans in the next few years?
JL: Basically with ML, we want more of different, you know, factors to go into the forecasting than currently. So, but we have high, high hopes for it and the main kind of idea is to get more dynamics in what we talked about for fresh today.
So, as a part of a fresh module as well, the forecast-based order parameter dynamics and changes between the different weekdays and all of that. So, we want to get as dynamic as possible. We want the goods to be there when the customer is there.
