Reitan Convenience Sweden (RCS) is a leading company in the Swedish convenience store industry with over 400 stores and are well-known for their Pressbyrån and 7-Eleven brands. Henrik Carlsson, Director of IT and Digitalization, and Martina Molander, Category and Purchasing Manager at Reitan sat down to share how RELEX is helping them optimize their promotion planning and execution.
Transcript
Henrik Carlsson: I’m Henrik Carlsson. I work with IT. My title is Director of IT and Digitalization. Reitan Convenience in Sweden, we are part of the Reitan Family, which consists of similar brands as us in the many, many countries in the Nordics and in the Baltics. In Sweden, we handle three major brands. We handle Pressbyran, 7-Eleven, and PBX, which is our sustainability experimental store.
A few years back, we invested in the part of, of the RELEX promo suite – in evaluate and optimize – in order to better track the way that we are handling our campaigns and what the result of the campaigns were. RELEX were selected by us in two steps, really. First, it was selected by us in order to evaluate and optimize our promotions.
Then we saw that as a strong analytical model, which was easy for our teams to utilize to track the result of the campaigns. And then as a second step one, we also wanted to move away from the manual processes in the campaign planning. It was natural for us to also touch on that part of the RELEX promo suite, to move into the promo plan setup as well.
Martina Molander: So, my name is Martina Molander and I am the Category and Purchasing Manager at Reitan Convenience in Sweden. So my team is responsible for all the assortments in the stores, and also all the promotions that we actually do. For me and my team, I think the greatest value is that we now are moving from actually having a lot of opinions about, campaigns and promotions.
And now we actually have the data. So, when we make decisions now, regarding our, and discussing, discussing our campaigns, we actually have the data, to do it. The best part for us as well is that we we now have gathered everything regarding our campaigns in one place, and that’s super important for us. So before, we had different Excel sheets and Google sheets and there were a lot of people involved.
We had a lot of data in different places. Now we have gathered everything in one place so that we can both forecast our campaigns forward, but we also have the data from the past and that’s very important for us when we optimize and analyze our campaigns.
HC: Looking forward, we are now in a position where we will optimize and trim and improve our processes, both what we do in RELEX, but also in the neighboring solutions, so that we can get more and more value out of the products that we have just implemented.
I think there are two, things that we are considering together with RELEX. One is our ability for space and planogram. And the second thing is, of course, as we are part of a group consisting of many convenience companies across the Nordics and the Baltics, I think, as we in Sweden are able to show how well we manage our campaigns, there would be high interest from our colleagues as well in the other countries. So, to have that collaboration between the different markets within Reitan Convenience, I think is the next step as well.
MM: The partnership with RELEX post-implementation has been been good, both from the RELEX part, but also, we have a lot of people involved from our part as well.
And it has been a fantastic team, from both sides, actually. That was the key, I think, to the success. But it actually was just a good, it was started, a few weeks ago, and, that was actually quite a good start, actually. And that couldn’t have been possible without the support from both RELEX but also a lot of people at Reitan as well.
