Rite Aid Senior Manager of Allocation & Store Replenishment, Michael Marquardt, took a few minutes to share how RELEX is helping them streamline forecasting, replenishment, and allocation and drive efficiency for their distribution centers. Rite Aid is a leading pharmacy and health and wellness retailer operating more than 2,000 outlets across the United States.
Transcript:
My name is Michael Marquardt, Senior Manager of Allocations. Rite Aid Pharmacy operates about 2,300 stores in 17 states. We employ about 6,300 plus pharmacists. Really focused on health and wellness for all our customers.
We use RELEX demand planning, warehouse purchasing, and store replenishment and allocations. So, we really needed to get something that brought all of that together. We were able to use RELEX to combine all those activities into a single forecast versus manually trying to figure out how much product we needed in stores.
When we were looking for a system to put all our activities under, we looked at a lot of different things. We needed to make sure that we could do warehouse replenishment, needed to make sure we could do store replenishment and allocations, needed to make sure we could handle any off-shelf programs. You know, seasonal came into play quite a bit.
Once we made our final decision to go with RELEX, they spent a lot of time really understanding what our business was and what we really needed and coming back to us with solutions to accomplish that. So, using RELEX, we’re already starting to see a lot of benefits.
Having a single solution that encompasses all our different scenarios, combining everything into that single forecast. Being able to roll that up at the item-store-level up to the DC for purchasing, making sure stores really get what they need when they need it.
We actually recently just got the RELEX business rules module – really looking forward to diving in, creating our own business rules – kind of having that extra level of control and controlling what we can do. Finding challenges we have, being able to go in and create rules to fix that challenge, review that with our with our RELEX support team, and then implement that into production.
Our partnership with RELEX has really been strong, so using RELEX and being able to forecast at the item-store-level, we’ve really seen an impact at store-level with on-shelf availability, being able to cut down excess inventory, just having the right amount of product at the right time in the stores.
So, with RELEX, I’ve seen a bunch of efficiencies at our distribution centers. Being able to provide them with forward-looking forecasts. They are able to use that to project labor, which has actually really helped our efficiencies in our distribution centers.
