Shopko focuses on assortment and store space

Shopko Stores is looking more closely at how it uses store space and how customers fill their baskets.

The retailer has renewed its license of APT’s Test & Learn and Market Basket Analyzer software andAPT’s Space Planning Optimizer software.

“Shopko is making efforts to continue to localize and tailor our assortment for our customers,” said Russ Steinhorst, Shopko’s CFO. “We recognized the opportunity to leverage APT’s Space Planning Optimizer as a way to accelerate and advance our capabilities to achieve our goals of having more tailored assortments and customer shopping experiences in our different markets,”

In addition to licensing APT’s Space Planning Optimizer software, Shopko is extending its Test & Learn and Market Basket Analyzer licenses. Test & Learn helps Shopko evaluate and design key strategic and operational initiatives, while Market Basket Analyzer software helps the retailer automatically synthesize transaction-level data to rapidly identify which items to promote, which to bundle, which to cut, and more.

“Whether informing SKU rationalization decisions, designing promotional bundles, or determining which products are true traffic drivers, we use Market Basket Analyzer to get a more holistic picture of each item, including the typical purchase behavior and customer loyalty associated with that item,” said Tom Abbott, senior VP at Shopko. “We are very excited to continue our relationship with APT and to leverage Test & Learn and Market Basket Analyzer to quantify and optimize the customer value of our strategic decisions and initiatives.”

“We found that once the space-related data was identified, validated, and loaded –which took less than 3 days—the software generated fresh, new insights. The software was able to quantify incremental margin opportunities from modest space changes. The software also prioritized the stores where we would generate the largest impact from our space changes. Another benefit recognized was that the software helped identify new store clustering opportunities as well as optimizing pre-determined store clusters. Having a space planning tool that can not only make recommendations but can, in real-time, quantify and optimize the impact of our own space recommendations, has improved our ability to use analytics to make more effective space allocation decisions,” said Todd Armstrong, Shopko’s VP of Finance.