Price Chopper links production planning to in-store data
A Northeast grocery chain is centralizing its planning capabilities for food production.
Price Chopper is rolling out the Invafresh Fresh Retail Platform, a mobile-centric automated production planning solution. Leveraging the platform, Price Chopper will obtain real-time updates to its food production plans based on critical in-store data, such as inventory and demand.
As a result, Price Chopper intends to overcome food production planning challenges due to changing demand and labor shortages. The retailer seeks to more accurately forecast labor requirements and inventory needs based on this intelligence, enabling it to optimize limited resources.
The retailer will also run multi-production cycles per day; create auto-generated pick lists that can be used by multiple employees simultaneously for assembled grocery products; and measure employee performance against established production metrics.
In-store associates and commissary food production staff will be provided with enhanced tablet and touchscreen capabilities to perform real-time inventory updates directly on a production plan from the store floor, enabling them to have access to critical data from anywhere and receive real-time feedback as they execute the plan.
Associates will also be able to confirm whether a product was spot-checked prior to a review taking place. Any recommendations can be recalculated based on the revised inventory value, helping production plans always remain accurate.
In addition, by taking a centralized approach to production planning, Price Chopper hopes to better manage margin costs through recipe costing and control over defined production processes.
“Invafresh has helped Price Chopper to produce the correct amounts of product to meet our customer demand while reducing our exposure to excess shrink. We are working on enhancements with Invafresh that will further our effort in exceeding our customer’s expectations for delivering fresh products while limiting the spoilage that ends up in the landfill," said Patrick Iannotti, director of retail operations at Price Chopper.
“Using our platform, grocery retailers can add a layer of intelligence and automation to their production planning, which is known to be both complex to forecast and scale, while also being labor-intensive,” said Joe Smirlies, senior VP, product at Invafresh. “We remove the complexity of in-store and commissary production planning as our Fresh Retail Platform is purpose-built for grocery retailers.”
Asda links order processing to inventory
U.K.-based supermarket retailer Asda is enhancing order processing by implementing cloud microservices-based Blue Yonder order management solutions. The retailer will obtain real-time inventory visibility and connect its entire supply chain to obtain the capacity to fulfill demand across any channel, at any time. Asda also seeks to provide dynamic slotting options to its end customer for both home deliveries and in-store pickup orders.
By deploying Blue Yonder’s flexible, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)-based cloud microservices, Asda also seeks to optimize its entire click-to-deliver customer experience, starting with customer engagement and running through order fulfillment.
Based in Schenectady, N.Y., Price Chopper/Market 32 operates 130 supermarkets in New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.