Business Intelligence (BI)

Online specialty luggage retailer eBags Inc. has restructured its senior leadership ranks with several new hires and the promotion of long-time executives.

Scott Erdman has been named chief merchandising officer and Krista Paul is joining as VP of content innovation. eBags also appointed Mike Frazzini CTO and Chris Seahorn VP of marketing.

Discount grocer Aldi has deployed an energy management solution that gives it control and visibility across its nearly 1,500 U.S. stores.

The chain has implemented Siemens’ Site Controls energy management system, with the majority of the installations involving retrofits at existing stores where thermostats or third-party energy management systems were replaced. But the system has been deployed in newly constructed stores as well. Aldi will also install the Site Controls system in new stores as it continues to expand across the nation.

Vendor partners of Target and Walgreens will soon be receiving actionable insights and alerts aimed at improving assortments, product availability, new item retail launches and promotion effectiveness in the Midwest.

Carlin Group (part of Beacon United), a regional sales and marketing solutions company focused on the Midwestern market, is leveraging the retail analytics platform from Retail Solutions Inc. (RSI) to help clients including Target and Walgreens suppliers improve their overall customer experience in the region.

Specialty online fashion retailer Rue La La is telling all the young dudes (or dudettes) about the latest in fashion with a new content site called Rue Now.

Building on the fact that the average Rue La La member visits the site more than twice a week for purposes of learning and discovery as well as making purchases, the retailer launched the Rue Now platform will complement its daily shopping boutiques by giving customers access to timely fashion and lifestyle news.

Schenectady, New York-based The Golub Corp. may be a smaller grocery retailer, but it’s taking a big approach to vendor collaboration.

The operator of more than 130 Price Chopper and Market 32 grocery stores in the Northeast has selected Park City Group’s Scan-based Trading solution to support a new go-to-market strategy for direct store delivery (DSD) vendors.

Sales has come a long way. Gone are the days of door-to-door and the other tired sales methods. And salespeople? They’ve evolved, too.

Training a sales team can be hard — especially when it comes to building a new workforce. You know, those employees whose only door-to-door experience consists of trick-or-treating. Yep, we’re talking about Millennials.

Oak Brook, Ill. -- Inland Real Estate Investment Corp. has been named a finalist of this year’s InformationWeek Elite 100, a list of the top business technology innovators in the U.S. Inland Investments has also been selected as a finalist for a Business Innovator award in the category of Cloud Services.

Niemann Foods, a 100-plus-store independent supermarket chain headquartered in Quincy, Illinois, is individually engaging customers wherever they are.

A lot of retailers reach the stage of installing traffic counters in their stores, but it’s at this point that problems can start. The traffic data can become unreliable or the store operations team may not know what to do with the data or how to apply it, which leaves retailers looking for the expected insights and additional sales.
The fact is, they’re there — retailers just need to know how to find them.

Whole Foods Market has been offering deliveries via Instacart in select markets for about a year, but reportedly is significantly extending the scope of the deal.

According to Re/code, Whole Foods has at least in principle made an unspecified investment in Instacart. Whole Foods has also reportedly signed a five-year deal making Instacart its exclusive perishables delivery provider.