Vallarta Supermarkets is a regional grocery retailer based in Los Angeles, California. It specializes in Hispanic and Latin American foods and serves customers through 54 stores across the state. Parker Hurlburt, Vallarta’s Director of Category Analytics, took time to share how they are using RELEX to improve efficiency and collaboration and better meet customers’ needs through data-driven decision-making.
Transcript
My name is Parker Hurlburt. I’m the Director of Category Analytics at Vallarta Supermarkets in Los Angeles, California. Vallarta started in 1985 as a small meat market in Venice, California by the Gonzalez family. Since then, we’ve grown to 54 stores throughout California, and we have all sorts of Hispanic and Latin American products as well as your standard supermarket products.
We’ve been growing rapidly and we plan a lot more expansion, and we found out that as we were growing the current tools we have really weren’t meeting our needs. And so we looked around at various vendors and settled on RELEX because it provides a lot of information that we need a lot of different reporting styles. The use of it is very easy, and it’s going to meet our needs now and in the future as we continue to grow throughout the state.
The other thing I think is what we’re looking for is the expandability of it. Because as we grow, we’re going to grow beyond just planograms and assortment. We’re going to expand into inventory controls and replenishment and forecasting and all of those things that we need to not just expand our stores, but also continue to be the premier Hispanic retailer in California and elsewhere.
The other part is that I don’t have a big staff, and so I didn’t want to have a company come in where I was going to now have to hire a bunch of programmers, have a bunch of people learning new things. I needed it to work for us and our size and my team size, and that’s what they really provided.
So that’s really what I’m excited about because I don’t have to expand my team just to make it work. I think some of the specific achievements that we’re looking for are a time reduction of my staff to do just basic building block work, where they can do more thinking, and they can actually have a bigger impact on our sales.
And I think we’re looking for an easier way to provide information to our buyers, our stores, our managers, my boss, the COO, everybody throughout the organization based on data. And that’s what we’re really looking forward to from this. Is this going to be able to work throughout the organization to be able to provide people with the facts that they need to make better decisions, whether it’s a person in the store who’s just resetting the shelf or all the way up to our ownership in the family, for them to say, “Yes, this is where we want to open a store.
This is what we want to bring into the store.” Working with our vendors, especially those vendors from south of the border, to bring in and their products and information on that. Everybody RELEX has a specialty in an area where they really want to focus and help us, but they’re very good at answering questions and helping us feel like we don’t have to invent all of this.
They’re going to help provide us with the industry standards and best practices, and then we going to look at that and say, “That works for us, and we want to change that a little bit,” without forcing us to do all of the work or just saying, “Well, we don’t know. You tell us what to do.” And now we’re too much in control because this for us is a journey that we’re just starting. For me, as I was doing my investigation to start, this was finding out how well RELEX is known and how great people think of them, and gave me a lot of confidence as we brought them in and said, let’s do this.
And then as we went through the process of looking in who and selecting people, they came to me and said, “It’s pretty obvious we know we’re going with RELEX.”
