Petbarn automates planogram management
A leading Australian pet supplies retailer is keeping up with store growth and rapid changes in SKUs by streamlining the development and upgrading of planograms.
Operating 267 stores across Australia, Petbarn is undergoing rapid expansion, adding 13 new stores just in the past few months. Each store requires complex space planning, featuring up to 70 bays and carrying a wide range of pet products with a high volume of SKU change and localized assortment needs.
For example, manual planogram production for the pet food category, which includes fresh and frozen cooler products, would take up more than the full working hours of one space planner. Growing consumer demand for premium products and frequent introductions and discontinuations of items also helped drive constant updates in SKU data.
Already utilizing the Blue Yonder Category Knowledge Base (CKB) solution as a “single source of truth” for product data, Petbarn needed a solution that could automate large volumes of repetitive planogramming work at scale. After evaluating options, the retailer decided to move forward with implementation of artificial intelligence-enabled Crisp planogram management technology.
As a result, Petbarn can process mass product changes in rapid succession across all planograms. When a category reset removes 50 discontinued products, Crisp handles the deletions across every planogram at once rather than requiring manual updates file by file.
[READ MORE: Here's how much store inefficiencies cost retailers]
New products entering the range are automatically positioned within the relevant brand block, and changes are color-coded for clarity. In addition, a tiles feature within the planogram workspace brings additional key metrics such as sales, performance, rankings and stock levels directly into view.
With hours of technical manual labor eliminated and revisions across hundreds of stores now taking only 30 minutes, Petbarn has shifted its manual planning focus toward making merchandising decisions grounded in store-level sales insights.
Results have included:
- Planogram creation for categories like prescription diet has been reduced from three weeks to one day.
- 240-plus planogram updates processed per hour through automation.
- Significant reduction in manual planogram maintenance effort.
- Petbarn reports that new planograms built with Crisp received the best store feedback it has seen.
Petbarn is now rolling out the platform to the entire space planning team, enabling planograms to be calibrated precisely to local consumer demand.
Petbarn is a business unit of Green Cross Pet Wellness.
