Sainsbury"™s Improves Efficiency with Signage Implementation

UK's premier food retailer, Sainsbury's wanted to create a unified signage system that would bring together promotional advertising and shelf-edge labeling, enabling the retailer to react more quickly to market conditions. The retailer recently implemented Retail Enterprise Suite from Episys to generate all labeling and signs to ensure that they are consistent for all Sainsbury's core grocery, home and lifestyle items.

The improved efficiency will enable staff to spend less time on administrative activities and more time serving customers. In addition, there will be significant time savings - currently, promotional changes take up to three days to implement, Retail Enterprise Suite allows changes in less than a day.

There are also significant head office benefits as Sainsbury's will be able to consolidate onto one optimized platform which will in turn enable the IT team to provide a better level of support to its business users as they will be supporting only one signage system.

"Our focus is on serving our customers and by implementing simple processes in store we can give colleagues more time to do this," says Gary Balmer, head of trading and supply chain systems at Sainsbury's. "The project with Episys will see our Promotional Advertising and Shelf Edge Labeling solutions consolidated into one, thus communicating our offering clearly and accurately from one single source. This approach will give Sainsbury's significant benefits, including greater consistency of pricing and promotional messages, which is of paramount importance, particularly as we develop key growth areas such as Non-foods and Online."

The decision to implement a new ticketing solution has come about as a result of an in depth analysis of their current pricing, promotions and POS capability. At Sainsbury's, the Store Inventory Management System and Master data for price change and promotional set up for Core Grocery and Home and Lifestyle, resides within an Oracle Retek application. It was therefore imperative that the solution would be able to interface with the current Oracle platform. Retail Enterprise Suite will work in both centralized and decentralized architectures and has been designed to support major commercial database platforms, which include Oracle.

Retail Enterprise Suite will also enable Sainsbury's to embrace new technology such as, electronic shelf edge labels, which will enable real time pricing, kiosk-based guided selling tools and other multi-media formats, all driven from a central solution thus ensuring consistency of message across all communication media.

The adoption of Retail Enterprise Suite is part of a larger program called "ËœThe Simple Program" designed to make stores simpler to manage. The old legacy systems will be transformed into a system that has a service orientated architecture (SOA).

Balmer continued, "Episys has been a significant component of our IT strategy for over five years and they have proved themselves to be an extremely valuable partner. We are delighted to be working with them on this next phase of our signage evolution and welcome the expertise that they bring in this space."