Fareway Partners with Salient to Enhance Category Management Analytics
Fareway Stores is a top Midwest grocery store chain with 137 locations across Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Missouri. With a rapidly growing number of stores, they faced a serious challenge that every time a new location was added to their legacy system, it crashed. This resulted in a loss of productivity, data, and internal resources to troubleshoot.
Fareway chose Salient, not only to streamline their growth by effectively managing data from new stores. The system also afforded the team the ability to do more complex data exploration. Nick Greb, Category Data Analyst, said:
“It’s very easy to break it down in many different metrics, from a department to a sub-department to even a category level.”
A True Collaborative Partnership
The rollout began with the Salient team working closely with the Category Management Department at Fareway. As part of the process, Fareway provided specific analytical goals, business scenarios, and reporting that was needed to effectively manage its stores. Andrea Chase, VP of Category Management, spoke to the success of the initial program:
“We’ve had such a positive experience in working with Salient in our area, we’re looking at it throughout our entire company.”
Improve Operational Effectiveness to Drive Growth
One of the key benefits that Salient’s platform immediately brought to Fareway was improving operational efficiency. Not only with its ability to effectively store massive amounts of data, but also to take that data and report back on product & category trends, consumer buying patterns, supply chain performance, and much more.
Legacy System Crashing During New Store Launches
“One of our challenges with our old platform was the amount of data that we were throwing at it. Things simple as opening a new store would crash that system, would create data lag. We were unable to have line of sight to retail sales in our various retail locations. We had an antiquated tool, very difficult to add additional data to that platform, always going back to our IT department to get answers and insights.”
Clint Jenkins, VP of Wholesale Purchasing
Dynamic Data to Improve Promotions
Driving Growth Together
“Salient has been a true partner in helping us get that speed to market, to our store managers and our staff at store level. Just how we want it to be. One of the best features we found in Salient is not only can we look at data in a spreadsheet form or a static form, but we can be dynamic with it and really examine all of our promotions to what went in the basket along with that promotion.”
Bret Wiltse, Executive VP of Merchandising